Brazil President in Runoff Election; Evangelical Candidate Finishes Third
Brazilian incumbent president Dilma Rousseff is facing a runoff after receiving 42 percent of the votes and failing to win the majority of votes in Sunday's election. She will be going up against centre-right candidate Aecio Neves, who received 34 percent of votes. Evangelical hopeful and former environment minister Marina Silva finished third with 21 percent.
Rousseff vowed to continue working for change, and said that voters had expressed their rejection of "the ghosts of the past, recession and unemployment."
"I clearly understood the message from the streets and from the ballot boxes. The majority of Brazilians want us to speed up the Brazil we are building," she added, according to BBC News.
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The runoff between Rousseff and Neves is scheduled for Oct. 26.
Neves has called on Silva to back his campaign following her defeat, and while the evangelical candidate did not issue an outright endorsement, she noted that most Brazilians had voted for a change in president.
"There is no way to misinterpret the sentiment of voters, of the 60 percent who moved for change," Silva said, according to Reuters.
Silva, a Pentecostal Christian, gained notable ground in recent months and would have been the first evangelical elected as president in the predominantly Roman Catholic Brazil.
"Much of the church will converge on her candidacy," evangelical pastor Robson Rodovalho said days before the vote. "Brazil is a real democracy. It's only a matter of time before we have an evangelical president. That's a fact."
Silva only came into the race in August after her Socialist Party's first candidate, Eduardo Campos, died in a plane crash.
Fox News noted that after Silva's initial gains in the polls, Rousseff's Worker's Party targeted the candidate with a highly negative and aggressive campaign, which took out Silva's momentum.
Neves served as governor of Minas Gerais, Brazil's second-most populous state, and left with an approval rating of over 90 percent when he left office in 2012.
His grandfather, Tancredo Neves, was set to become the country's first post-dictatorship president in 1985 but fell ill and died before taking office.
"At the end of a dramatic campaign, Brazilians are still really no closer to knowing who will lead the world's seventh-largest economy," BBC News' Wyre Davies said.
"Although there are now two distinct visions for the future of Brazil — Aecio Neves's business-friendly image or the paternal interventionism of Dilma Rousseff — whoever persuades voters that they can provide a bit of both might well win the ultimate prize."
