BRAZIL VOTES

Although the people of Brazil will have to return to the Presidential polling booths in a month's time it seems very likely that Dilma Rousseff will be their choice in the run-off after she took about 47 per cent of the vote against two opponents on Sunday. It was a remarkable result for a woman who was little known in her own country until the outgoing President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva named her as his choice to succeed him; she had been his Chief of Staff for some years but her earlier life as a left-wing activist had included a spell in jail when she was tortured by the military junta in the 1950s.

The election has turned the searchlight on Brazil which after Lula's eight years in office is probably the most successful nation in the continent of South America. As head of the Workers' Party there were doubts about Lula when he was elected in 2002 but, buoyed by strong export earnings in agricultural products and oil, he has been able to make good some of his promises to reduce the country's appalling poverty and at the same time invest heavily in the country's industrial future. He leaves office with an 80 per cent approval rating -- an achievement that cannot often have been equalled -- and Dilma Rousseff has been wise in her campaigning to promise, in effect, “more of the same”.