Black and poor women may decide who will be the next president of Brazil
On the morning of November 2, Brazil’s electoral commission published the results for the presidential vote. The campaign was on for a little more than a week and the results were expected to be announced at about noon from the headquarters of the National Electoral Court. In the previous presidential campaign, Brazil voted for the candidate of the right, the center-right Workers’ Party.
When the commission finally declared the winners at about noon that day, it did so with the clear bias toward the Workers’ Party, the center-right party that had dominated Brazilian politics since the end of the military dictatorship more than a decade before. While the vote was close, there were far fewer votes for the center-left Workers’ Party of the previous government, the PSDB, than for the center-right party, the PT, despite the fact that the left had done little to help Dilma Rousseff win the presidency.
The announcement of the results for president in Brazil is almost always followed by one of two reactions, and there was an almost identical one in this case. The PSDB, the party of the outgoing president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, immediately declared victory for Lula. And if the right was behind Lula, it was also behind the Workers’ Party, the center-right party in power for the last 23 years, and it would be the first time since 1994 that the ruling Brazilian Workers’ Party would have its leader elected into office twice. The first half was expected: A total of 674.9 million out of 693 million votes was cast in the presidential race, a popular vote share of 46.8 percent.
The second reaction came out of the left, the party that brought Rousseff to power, the PT, the left-of-center party in Brazil. It declared victory for Rousseff, the candidate of the PT, of course, in what is by far the most leftist
