With 100% of the vote counted, Workers' Party (PT) candidate Dilma Rousseff will become Brazil's first female president, winning the run-off election by a margin of 56.1%-43.9% over PSDB rival José Serra. She pledges to continue the policies of her predecessor, Luis Inácio Lula da Silva, and has set the principal goal of her presidency to be the eradication of poverty in Brazil.
More analysis of the results below the fold.
After a long and grueling campaign, the most negative seen in Brazil since the historic 1989 battle between Lula and Collor, Dilma Vana Rousseff and the PT emerged the winners with a 12-million-vote margin of victory out of more than 99 million votes cast, or 12.1%. Compared to the more than 20-point blowouts of 1994, 1998, 2002, and 2006, this election seemed to be very close and was hard-fought right down to the last hour. The final result, however, would still be considered a healthy landslide by American standards - a bigger win than all but three US presidential elections over the past 50 years.
Dilma Rousseff will be the first female President of Brazil, the largest nation to directly elect a female head of government. She will be the third woman currently serving as president in Latin America, joining Argentina's Cristina Kirchner and Costa Rica's Laura Chinchilla.
CNN posted an excellent article on her background.
The 2010 run-off election had a turnout of 78.6%, the lowest turnout in any presidential election since the return of direct elections in 1989. (Yes, I know, Democrats in the US would kill for a turnout anywhere near that.) Most analysts blame this on the election being held in the middle of a 4-day holiday weekend, but it is also possible that some of Green Party (PV) candidate Marina Silva's 20 million voters decided to sit out the second round with its elevated level of negativity.
Dilma Rousseff was President Lula's hand-picked successor, and served first as Minister of Energy beginning in 2002 and then as Lula's Chief of Staff from 2005-10. Her election certainly owes a great deal to the success of the Brazilian economy during Lula's two terms and his enduring popularity: the approval/disapproval numbers for his government currently stand at 83%/3%. In contrast, Cardoso, Lula's predecessor, left office with an approval rating of only 23%. Dilma will begin her term of office with a larger majority in Congress and something Lula never enjoyed: a significant majority in the Senate. The governing coalition, and most specifically the left-wing of the governing coalition, gained seats in both houses of Congress and in the majority of State Legislatures. The opposition PSDB shrunk slightly, and their extreme right-wing ally, the Democrats, were decimated.
The PSDB can take heart, however, in the fact that they managed to increase their share of governorships to eight, while keeping control of the two most populous states in Brazil: São Paulo and Minas Gerais. The PT retained only five, but their left-wing ally the PSB (Brazilian Socialist Party) managed to capture six, giving them an all-time high in both number of governorships and members of Congress. This strong, northeastern-based party, has a lot of potential for growth in the coming years if it can find a way to "break out" of the northeast and become a true national party, much in the way that the PT finally broke out of the south and southeast with Lula's first win in 2002.
Finally, to those in the media who twisted every story to put Dilma in the worst light possible and who attempted to dig up dirt from the sealed files of the military government; to whoever spread baseless rumours across the internet and produced anonymous professional-quality videos showing how Brazil would collapse under a Dilma presidency; to "analysts" who claimed for months that a Dilma win was simply impossible; to those misogynists who didn't think a woman had a chance; and to all the strategists who planned and carried out a campaign based not on proposals and projects but on fear and prejudice; I leave you with this:
Good luck to all of you Stateside. Get Out the Vote! Whatever happens tomorrow, keep on working and fighting the good fight.