Brazil gearing up for presidential elections

Brazil is gearing to vote in Sunday’s presidential elections, with the country’s incumbent president, Dilma Rousseff, leading opinion polls by nearly 20%.

Environmentalist Marina Silva and pro-business Social Democrat senator Aecia Neves will also be contesting the presidential election.

Rouseff has come under heavy criticism recently, with widespread demonstrations lambasting the government’s “excessive” spending on the World Cup. Reports of corruption scandals, poor public services, and poor economic growth have overshadowed the country’s early economic boom that lifted millions from poverty in the early 2000s.

According to a survey by pollster Datafolha, Rousseff is holding on to her commanding lead with 44 percent voter support, while Neves and Silva enjoy a 26% and 24% support respectively.

A separate poll by the Ibope research institute showed Neves with 27 percent, Silva with 24 percent and Rousseff with 46 percent. Meanwhile, the National Transport Confederation had Rousseff on 40.6 percent, Neves 24 percent and Silva 21.4 percent.

The election, expected to be the closest in a generation, is widely seen as a referendum on 12 years of government by Rousseff's Workers' Party (PT).

For months Rousseff, 66, a former guerrilla who was jailed and tortured for fighting the country's 1964-1985 dictatorship, looked poised to coast to an easy victory.

However, the race was dramatically altered on August 13 when the third-place Socialist candidate Eduardo Campos was killed in a plane crash and replaced by Silva for the presidential bid.

The proponents of change are now split between Silva, 56, and Neves, 54, from the powerful Social Democratic Party, which ruled the country from 1995 to 2002.

Silva, who belongs to Brazil's surging Evangelical Christian community and says she wants to be the diverse country's first "poor, black president," was initially projected to beat Rousseff in a runoff but has now slipped back into the spot Campos occupied before his death.