Ruling party candidate Dilma Rousseff must win over voters concerned about her abortion views and corruption in her inner circle but she remains the clear favourite to win an October 31 runoff election and become Brazil's next president.
Rousseff and her supporters were disappointed after she managed 46.9 percent of the votes in Sunday's presidential election, short of the majority needed to avoid a second round against opposition candidate Jose Serra, who took 32.6 percent.
Yet Rousseff, 62, still has by far the biggest asset in the campaign: the support of massively popular President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. Rousseff previously served as Lula's chief of staff. He handpicked her to continue the stable economic policies that have made Brazil a darling of foreign investors and lifted 20 million people out of poverty in the South American country of about 193 million people.
Opinion polls conducted before Sunday's voting projected that Rousseff would win a runoff over Serra by as many as 20 percentage points. But investors said some volatility was likely on Monday in Brazil's financial markets as they braced for a bitter final four weeks of campaigning.
"Suddenly, the race is back on," said Neil Shearing, senior emerging markets economist at Capital Economics in London. Major market swings are unlikely since both Serra and Rousseff are widely expected to continue Lula's responsible fiscal management policies. But Shearing said their differing views on structural reforms such as how to streamline Brazil's onerous tax load could cause some "market upsets" if opinion polls seesaw in coming weeks.
Rousseff, a former guerrilla leader in the 1960s who evolved over time into a pragmatic career civil servant, saw her lead in polls shrink during the last two weeks after the spread of Internet videos showing past comments in which she appeared to favour decriminalisation of abortion.
Abortion is illegal in Brazil, a country with a large Catholic population, except in cases of rape or if the mother's life is at risk. By Monday morning, videos tagged "Dilma" and "abortion" had amassed more than 2 million hits on YouTube.
Her comments appear to have alienated many religious voters who oppose abortion, especially evangelical Christians who are growing in power and influence in Brazil. Many opted for fellow evangelical Marina Silva, a third candidate from the Green Party who attracted 19.3 percent of the vote on Sunday and whose support is now being sought by Rousseff and Serra.
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