In the race to beat Dilma Rousseff, José Serra has hit his stride at last. But his final sprint may have come too late
Oct 21st 2010 | SÄO PAULO
AFTER months in which even his fellow party members had given him up for lost, José Serra, the runner-up in the first round of Brazil’s presidential election, now looks as if he has a slim chance. On October 3rd the candidate of the centrist opposition Party of Brazilian Social Democracy (PSDB) got 33% of the vote, well behind the 47% won by Dilma Rousseff of the left-wing ruling Workers’ Party (PT). The pair will face each other in a run-off on October 31st. Although recent polls differ widely, some say that Ms Rousseff’s lead has shrunk to only five or six points.
That gap barely exceeds the polls’ margin of error. And since Ms Rousseff fell short of forecasts that she would win an outright majority in the first round, Serra optimists are wondering if the pollsters are overestimating her support once again. A race whose outcome had seemed certain since June, when Ms Rousseff passed Mr Serra in the polls, now looks exciting.
In the two candidates’ debates since October 3rd, an energised Mr Serra has landed some telling blows. A few weeks ago Ms Rousseff stumbled when some religious leaders criticised her former support for liberalising Brazil’s strict abortion laws. Wary of alienating a conservative electorate, she backtracked, first saying that she “personally” opposed the procedure and then pledging that as president she would not move to ease access to abortion. That allowed Mr Serra to describe her as incoherent and two-faced. Her alleged lack of ballast also features in his campaign ads, which show the candidates as Russian dolls. His opens to a recital of his record as congressman, senator, health minister, and mayor and then governor of São Paulo, revealing doll after doll. Hers is empty.
Ms Rousseff’s main riposte is borrowed from Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, her mentor and the current president. In 2006 he beat the PSDB’s Geraldo Alckmin, in part by portraying him as pro-privatisation (which is almost as unpopular in Brazil as being pro-choice). Mr Alckmin had trouble responding to the charge. But Mr Serra countered by accusing Ms Rousseff of electioneering and robotically obeying her strategists. This time, it was Ms Rousseff who was left without a comeback.
The scent of victory, however faint, has fired up Mr Serra’s allies. Few PSDB candidates mentioned him in their campaigns for Congress or governorships, on the basis that reminding voters of links with the weaker presidential contender would be damaging. But both São Paulo and Minas Gerais, Brazil’s two most populous states, elected PSDB governors this year. The winners, Mr Alckmin and Antônio Anastasia, are trying to deliver their voters to Mr Serra. In Minas Gerais 6.3m people voted for Mr Anastasia, 3m more than Mr Serra got there—a big pool of potential swing voters.
The PSDB also hopes to woo the 20m Brazilians who voted for a third candidate, Marina Silva of the Green Party. On October 17th she and her party said they would make no endorsement in the run-off, despite offers from both sides of policies and posts in return. Recent polls suggest that, with the Greens staying neutral, Mr Serra will win a majority of Ms Silva’s votes.
Attempts to predict the result are complicated by worries about the reliability of polls. It is hard to construct a representative sample in a country as large, diverse and unequal as Brazil. Pollsters may also have failed to predict a run-off because they did not ask whether respondents intended to vote. In theory, that question is irrelevant in Brazil, since voting is compulsory. In practice, however, around a fifth of the electorate stays away.
And abortion, until recently an electoral problem only for Ms Rousseff, is now a wild card. On October 16th some newspapers picked up claims by former students of Mr Serra’s wife that she had mentioned having had an abortion herself. This gossip-mongering was swiftly denied by Mr Serra’s team. But it led him to steer clear of the subject in the following day’s debate. How it plays on internet forums and in evangelical sermons is anyone’s guess.
All this uncertainty has engendered two competing political narratives. In one, the polls are overstating Ms Rousseff’s lead. She has gained all she can from Lula’s support, and it was not enough. Exposed as an un-Christian flip-flopper and shorn of the momentum that came from seeming inevitability, she will see her voters melt away. Meanwhile the PSDB’s grandees will swing big states to Mr Serra, where they will be joined by most of Ms Silva’s voters.
The other view is that Ms Rousseff has wobbled only because Lula stepped back to let her take the limelight. Now that he has corrected his mistake and returned to her side, her support will tick up again. And the polls, far from being wrong before the vote, were a better guide to public opinion than was the result itself. Because of the plethora of candidates and posts, many confused voters may have spoilt or mis-cast their ballots. That will not happen in the run-off, with just two presidential candidates and fewer other races.
Even if Mr Serra is at last making a persuasive case, overturning a 14-point lead in just four weeks would be like performing a handbrake turn in a ten-tonne truck. Which version is closer to reality will be known only once the votes are counted.
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