ELECTIONS-BRAZIL:
Suspense - a Latecomer to the Campaign
Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO,  (IPS) - Interest in next Sunday's elections in Brazil has revived in the last two weeks of the campaign, as two big question marks emerge: will President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva win a first-round victory, and what repercussions will the latest corruption scandal have.

The most recent polls, whose results were released late Wednesday, show that an outright triumph on Sunday for President Lula is likely but not a sure thing. At the time the respondents were surveyed, between last Sunday and Tuesday, Lula's ratings stood at 53 percent, although a downward tendency had set in.

The polls thus continue to show Lula will be reelected, but the question is whether he will take at least 50 percent of the vote, in order to avoid the need for a runoff.

The other source of suspense that has heightened interest in media coverage of the elections once again are the questions not yet answered by the police in the case of an alleged smear campaign by the ruling Workers Party (PT) against the opposition.

Surveys show that Lula's popularity has been slightly dented since the scandal broke on Sep. 15.

Although his victory would seem to be guaranteed, Lula's decision not to take part in the last televised debate among the leading presidential candidates Thursday night may still hurt him -- although it could have been even worse if he had decided to appear and had done a poor job of fielding the inevitable questions on the series of corruption scandals that have dogged the PT since last year.

The uncertainty, which has introduced a note of excitement late in the race, has been exacerbated by the polls. However, these tend to underestimate the ratings of the candidates preferred by the poor, like Lula, Rio de Janeiro Mayor Cesar Maia, an expert on voting trends, admitted to IPS.

But this time, the huge gap between Lula and his leading opponent does not reflect a divide along socioeconomic lines, but a regional divide, with Geraldo Alckmin of the Brazilian Party of Social Democracy (PSDB) leading Lula by 10 percentage points in the south, while the president's ratings in the impoverished northeast -- his home region -- top 60 percent.

The growth in support for the PSDB candidate in the three southernmost states and in Sao Paulo, which accounts for nearly one-quarter of the country's voters, indicate that there will be a second round on Oct. 29, said Maia, a leader of the Liberal Front Party (PFL), which is allied with the PSDB in the current elections.

But abstention and the number of blank and spoiled ballots could end up determining whether or not there is a runoff, he predicted. Or, he added, if there is heavy rain in the northeast on Sunday, Lula would also lose votes.

The opposition believes that the outcome will be even further influenced by the investigation into the origins of the 1.7 million reals (790,000 dollars) that the federal police confiscated Sep. 15 from two men with ties to the PT.

The funds were purportedly to go to the Vedoin family, the owner of the Planam company, in exchange for files containing recordings, photos, a day planner and documents against Alckmin and the PSDB candidate for governor of Sao Paulo, José Serra.

Planam was at the centre of a scheme to sell overpriced ambulances to hundreds of city governments. Kickbacks then went to the Vedoin family, to legislators who obtained the purchase funds from the national budget, and to city government officials. More than 100 legislators have been named by Luiz Antonio Vedoin in what was dubbed "the bloodsuckers scandal", which has been under investigation by parliament since June.

The Vedoins now apparently offered to sell members of the PT campaign team a dossier that would mainly implicate Serra, a former health minister who is slated to win the provincial elections in Sao Paulo, in the ambulance purchase scheme.

Eight members of the PT campaign team have so far been implicated in the scandal.

On Tuesday, the courts ordered the preventive detention of six of them. But it was an "innocuous" decision, complained the president of Brazil's bar association, Roberto Busato, because no voter can be arrested and put behind bars between five days prior to and two days after elections, unless they are caught red-handed committing a crime.

Lula said the request for their arrest was a "political ploy" by prosecutor Mário Lúcio Avelar, given that the warrant cannot be enforced until after the elections. The aim, according to the president, was to generate news reports on judicial action against members of the PT on the eve of the elections.

The opposition, meanwhile, accuses the federal police of dragging its feet on the investigation and postponing announcements until after the elections, with the aim of benefiting Lula, since the police answer to the Interior Ministry and its chiefs have been appointed by the current government.

"Ethics in politics," one of the trademarks of the PT, and one of the main factors in its exponential growth since it was founded in 1980, has now been taken up as a slogan by the opposition since the spate of corruption scandals rocking the ruling leftist party since last year.

In May 2005, Roberto Jefferson, a legislator from an allied party, revealed a system of bribes in Congress. A number of heads rolled in that scandal, including several government ministers and PT leaders. Further allegations brought down the powerful former finance minister Antonio Palocci this year.

The suspense and uncertainty will likely linger until Sunday, when 125.9 million Brazilian voters will choose a president, state governors, and one senator for each of the country's 27 states, as well as national and state deputies.

Although voting is mandatory in Brazil, abstention was expected to be relatively high prior to the "dossier scandal", since a Lula victory appeared to be a foregone conclusion, and because of the disrepute into which politicians have fallen.