Rousseff moves ahead of centre-right rival in opinion poll just ahead of election in Brazil

Dilma Rousseff is favourite to win a second four-year term as Brazil's president in tomorrow's election with opinion poll showing she has carved out a clear lead over her centre-right opponent during the final week of a gruelling campaign.

Two closely watched surveys released in recent days have the Workers Party incumbent between six and eight points ahead of Social Democrat Aécio Neves, breaking the technical tie the two candidates had been locked in since a first round of voting on October 5th.

The trend is encouraging for the Workers Party, which traditionally finishes campaigns strongly as it is able to draw on the country’s largest and most motivated network of party militants who work hard to get out the party’s vote.

With Rousseff opening up a lead, Neves’s supporters were hoping for a strong performance in last night’s final televised debate between the candidates to try and reverse this week’s slide in his support.

Famous upset

In seeking to pull off a famous upset after being written off by commentators and even some members of his own party less than a month ago, Neves can take comfort from the pollsters’ failure to gauge his support, heading into the first round of voting.

Then surveys showed he was struggling to catch environmentalist Marina Silva in second place. Pollsters were left embarrassed when he ended up beating her by 12 points to force his way into tomorrow's run-off with the president.

Neves is hoping to capitalise on fears that the president’s mismanagement has driven Latin America’s biggest economy into recession and scared off desperately needed investment in its shoddy infrastructure, which the government has struggled to improve despite launching a series of programmes targeting the problem.

She in turn is running on her record of overseeing near-full employment, rising real incomes during 12 years of Workers Party rule and the defence of social programmes that have boosted the incomes of tens of millions of the poorest Brazilians.

In a contest during which both sides heavily employed negative tactics, Rousseff’s campaign has managed to increase Neves’s rejection rating from 35 to 42 per cent in just one week, in part by focusing on his party’s mismanagement of a water crisis in São Paulo.

In charge of Brazil’s wealthiest state for 20 years, the Social Democrats stand accused of mismanaging the state government’s response to a drought that has left water reservoirs in South America’s largest metropolitan region dangerously low ahead of the arrival of seasonal rains.

Aggressive rhetoric

Locked in the tightest race since it first won power in 2002, the Workers Party stepped up its aggressive rhetoric against Neves this week.

Rousseff’s political patron and predecessor as president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva comparing his party’s opponents to the Nazis and accused them of being “more intolerant than Herod”.

In his final campaign slots on local radio, Neves again spoke of the "liberation of Brazil" from "the arrogance of the Workers Party, the incompetence of the Dilma government" as he sought to tap the anti-incumbency feeling in Brazil manifested in the giant street protests of last year.

The federal government appeared to try and boost the president’s campaign by delaying the release of statistics on education, poverty and deforestation until after the election, lest negative data undermine her support.

The corruption scandal in state-controlled oil giant Petrobras again grabbed headlines in the final days of the campaign when the country's biggest-selling magazine, the virulently anti-Workers Party Veja, brought forward publication of its weekly edition by one day, hitting newsstands with a front page claiming Rousseff and Lula knew about a massive kickback scheme operated by allies within the company.

Impeachment

The magazine’s leading right- wing commentator seized on the claim, so far unproven, as grounds for impeachment proceedings against the president if she is re-elected, stoking fears that the bitter campaign will poison Brazil’s traditionally consensual politics even after it concludes.

Neighbouring Uruguay votes in the first round of its presidential election tomorrow in another contest featuring one of the left-wing movements that came to power on the pink tide that swept over South America after the millennium in a tight race to hold onto power.

Polls show former Broad Front president Tabaré Vázquez leading, as he seeks to replace his own successor José Mujica, who is constitutionally barred from immediate re-election.

But despite a decade of strong economic growth, diminishing inequality and relatively clean government under the Front, the young conservative National Party candidate Luis Lacalle Pou looks set to deny Vázquez victory on the first round and force a run-off at the end of next month.

The son of a former president, Lacalle Pou has promised to build on the Front’s achievements, but aged 41 is presenting himself as an innovator from a younger generation against the 74-year old Vázquez.

But controversially he has vowed to water down the country’s groundbreaking law that would see the state oversee the cultivation and sale of marijuana.