Runoff Foreseen in Brazil as Presidential Front-Runner Loses Steam

Fernando Collor de Mello, a centrist reformer who had taken a commanding lead in the polls for Brazil’s presidential election in November, is losing some of his steam, the latest surveys of public opinion show.

Three new polls published this week gave Collor a preference rating between 33% and 35%, down sharply from August when he was comfortably ahead of the field with a high of 44%. His decline, analysts say, makes the outcome of Brazil’s first popular presidential election since 1960 increasingly less predictable.

The Nov. 15 balloting will set the stage for full democracy in this nation of 145 million people after 21 years under military rule and five years under an interim civilian president chosen by an electoral college. If no candidate wins more than 50% of the vote, a runoff between the top two candidates will be held in December. The new president will take office in March.

Homero Icaza Sanchez, a veteran analyst of Brazilian polls, told a group of foreign reporters that the decline in Collor’s popularity and the rise of other candidates make a runoff all but inevitable. He said that changes shown by the polls may develop into trends that could radically alter the lineup of leading candidates by November.

Bicycle Factory Visit

After receiving advance notice of his dip in the polls, Collor appeared at a Sao Paulo bicycle factory with a renewed appeal for working-class support.

“I am here to work against the powerful and confront the predators of economic policy that prevent a better distribution of income among workers,” he said.

Collor’s ratings began to slide in mid-September, while figures for the second-place candidate, left-leaning populist Leonel Brizola, remained stationary at 14% to 15% in both August and September samplings.

Other candidates lag behind, with 9% or less. One of them, centrist Guilherme Afif Domingos, has won attention as a potential major contender by climbing from 1% of the preferences in June to as high as 9% this week.

“Afif threatens to eliminate Brizola from the second round and only more remotely might he become a serious threat to Collor,” wrote Villas-Boas Correa, a leading political columnist.

Tied at roughly the same level as Afif are conservative Paulo Maluf, center-leftist Mario Covas and leftist Luis Inacio da Silva, known as Lula.

Commercial Blitz

The latest changes coincide with a blitz of TV campaign commercials. Since Sept. 15, Brazilian television has been blasting viewers with 2 hours and 20 minutes a day of legally mandated political propaganda, half of it in prime time.

A total of 22 candidates get free daily air time of 30 seconds to 22 minutes each, depending on the number of congressional seats held by their supporters.

The TV commercials have helped relatively obscure candidates become better known. The biggest beneficiary has been Afif, 46, a businessman and congressman from Sao Paulo with strong middle-class appeal.

Collor, 40, won fame last year with a campaign against official corruption and bureaucratic privilege while he was governor of Alagoas, a small northeastern state. The theme caught on amid a widespread mood of disgust with official perfidy as the nation has struggled with triple-digit inflation and other economic hardships.

Handsome and well-spoken, Collor quickly became a centrist alternative to leftist presidential candidates Brizola and Lula, who were running strong at the beginning of the campaign this year. With the advent of the free commercials, however, it has become clear that Collor is not the sole non-leftist advocating cleaner, leaner government.

‘Beyond the Reality’

In a TV spot this week, Afif advocated a “silent revolution of a people who are seeking their own path, whether the government likes it or not, because the government is beyond the reality of the people, because today the informal economy tends to the people’s poverty, because governments serve the powerful.”

The anti-government mood has undermined the campaign of Ulysses Guimaraes, candidate of the Brazilian Democratic Movement Party, which holds a majority in both houses of Congress and was once the political base for President Jose Sarney’s unpopular interim government. In the latest opinion polls, Guimaraes received only 4% of the voter preference.