Today Brazil is holding a presidential election:
The popular and successful Silva, commonly referred to as Lula, is stepping down after serving two consecutive terms, the most allowed under the country’s constitution.
His former chief of staff and Silva’s hand-picked successor, Dilma Rousseff, 62, is widely expected to win the election. She represents the ruling Workers Party and is a former left-wing dissident who was jailed by Brazil’s military regime for two years in the early 1970s.
Opinion polls conducted before the vote showed Rousseff with a lead of about 20 percentage points over her closest rival, Jose Serra, a 68-year-old centrist from the Brazilian Social Democracy Party who was heavily defeated by Silva in the 2002 election.
Lula already voted, and wished he was a candidate (link in Spanish):
I’ll be posting on the results tomorrow.
Al-Jazeera filed a video report from a small town in Southern Brazil, and how Lula’s social programs are considered counterproductive,
Al-Jazeera is probably the only international network doing this type of reporting.
Also in the news in Brazil, Paraguayan president Fernando Lugo (he, the Bishop of the paternity suits) was flown from Asuncion, Paraguay, to Sao Paolo, Brazil, following a stroke during a course of chemotherapy for his lymphatic cancer.
