BRAZIL: Brazil's presidential election race has been thrown wide open after the surprise failure of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva to win outright Sunday's first round of voting.
He now faces a run-off in four weeks' time against the main opposition candidate, Social Democrat Geraldo Alckmin.
Brazil's first left-wing president won 48.61 per cent of the almost 126 million votes cast, just short of the 50 per cent plus one vote needed to avoid a run-off. Mr Alckmin surprised even his close supporters with 41.64 per cent of the vote, far exceeding his opinion poll numbers throughout the campaign.
The president won handsomely in the country's poor northeast, which has benefited most from his massive expansion of social spending.
He also topped the poll in Minas Gerais and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil's second and third most populous states.
Mr Alckmin was the clear winner in Brazil's rich southern states and in São Paulo, the most populous, where he beat the president by over 17 points. Mr Alckmin is well known in São Paulo from his time as governor from 2001 until earlier this year, but the state is also the birthplace of the president's Workers' Party and its main bastion of support.
A confident Mr Alckmin, long derided as a stiff technocrat unable to connect with the public, told cheering supporters on Sunday night: "I'm going into the second round with a great chance of winning. We're going to have an ethical, honest and efficient government."
President Lula in his first comment after Sunday's vote said: "I didn't win because I didn't win. I lacked votes. Victory has been delayed but it will come."
"We now have a very open race. Alckmin is on the rise and he's the one with the momentum behind him now," says David Fleischer, professor of politics at the University of Brasília. "Lula quickly needs to shake up his campaign team, refocus his programme and go and debate Alckmin, which he failed to do before the first round."
The president's lead over his rival narrowed in the final days of the campaign as the public learnt more details of a smear operation which members of his team attempted to mount against rival candidates.
One minister said after the vote that the release on Friday of police photos of more than €600,000 in cash seized from two members of his campaign staff as they sought to buy a dossier incriminating opposition candidates was particularly damaging.
Analysts say the president's last-minute decision not to attend a televised debate between the candidates on Thursday night alienated some voters, who saw it either as arrogance or that he had something to hide. Mr da Silva's campaign team quickly let it be known that the president would debate with Mr Alckmin before the second round of voting.
"A second round changes everything," says Paulo de Tarso Santos, a marketing strategist who has worked on Mr da Silva's previous presidential campaigns. "The candidates now need to change the whole feel of their campaigns." Both men will now seek the support of the 10 per cent of voters who opted for Heloísa Helena and Cristovam Buarque in the first round.
Both are former members of President Lula's Workers' Party, but were harshly critical of their old boss during the campaign, accusing him of arrogance and corruption.
Mr Alckmin refrained from a full frontal assault on President Lula over corruption allegations, amid rumours that the Workers' Party has plenty of incriminating evidence relating to his governorship of São Paulo state.
Analysts do not discount a gentleman's agreement to refrain from highlighting each other's misdemeanours, though others warn a close second round has the potential to descend into political warfare.
As part of his effort to derail Mr Alckmin's challenge, the president is rumoured to be interested in reaching an understanding with the powerful governors of São Paulo and Minas Gerais states, both of whom were elected with huge majorities on Sunday.
José Serra and Aécio Neves are party colleagues of Mr Alckmin but are believed to favour a second term for Mr da Silva which would then leave the way open for them to run for the presidency in 2010. Mr Lula's chances would increase markedly if they both failed to throw their full weight behind Mr Alckmin in the second round.
While many of Sunday's other races saw politicians accused of corruption and mismanagement punished, it also saw the return to politics of former president Fernando Collor. He was impeached in 1992 for corruption in office and banned from politics for eight years.
Now, 14 years later, he will return to Brasília as the senator for his home state of Alagoas.
Another notorious Brazilian politician returning to Brasília is Paulo Maluf, who topped the poll for federal deputy in São Paulo. His name is a byword in Brazil for massive corruption and he is accused of having robbed hundreds of millions of dollars in kickbacks on public projects.