Dilma Rousseff Re-elected President of Brazil

Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff won reelection in the presidential runoff held Sunday, garnering 51.45 percent of the votes, compared with 48.55 percent for Social Democratic challenger Aecio Neves, and with 98 percent of the votes counted, according to the Superior Electoral Tribunal.

Some 142.8 million voters were eligible to cast ballots for the next president and 14 of the 27 state governors.

Polling places opened at 8:00 a.m. and closed at 5:00 p.m. in most of the country, with Acre, on the border with Bolivia and Peru, closing its election precincts three hours later due to the time difference in the huge South American country.

Rousseff, with the Workers Party, and Neves, with the Brazilian Social Democratic Party, had emerged as the top two vote getters in the Oct. 5 first-round election and have slugged it out in one of the tightest presidential races of the past few decades.

Poll results released on Saturday by Datafolha and Ibope, Brazil’s two most highly respected polling firms, showed Rousseff leading Neves by between four and six percentage points, with the incumbent’s voter intent numbers falling and the opposition leader’s rising.

Rousseff had won 41.59 percent of the votes in the first electoral round, compared to 33.55 percent for Neves, and since no candidate obtained a majority Brazilian law mandated a runoff vote between the top two vote-getter.

Published in Latino Daily News