Brazil’s Rousseff survives abortion row, looks set to win presidency
Dilma Rousseff, front-runner in Brazil’s presidential race, appears to have successfully shifted the focus of the campaign away from corruption and her controversial views on abortion and back to the shining economic legacy of her popular former boss, President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.
Rousseff, a 62-year-old career civil servant and former leftist militant, fell short of the majority of votes needed to win the election outright in the October 3 first round as last-minute doubts of many evangelical Christian and Catholic voters about her support for abortion rights probably cost the Workers’ Party candidate an outright victory. Opposition challenger Jose Serra then closed her poll lead to as little as four points.
But her shift in focus appears to have re-energized her base in Brazil’s emerging lower-middle class, which has nearly doubled in size under Lula’s mix of market-friendly policies and social welfare programs, and now accounts for about half the population. Rousseff has promised to stick to Lula’s policies.
Rousseff’s support slipped precipitously in the 10 days before the first round but she has taken steps to avoid a similar fate this time. Her written promise not to change Brazil’s abortion laws, which forbid the practice in most cases, appears to have eased concerns among religious voters who abandoned her in the first round but are now coming back, a Datafolha poll showed.
Brazil’s ugly abortion reality lost in election noise
It was a little-noticed headline amid the daily crime, violence and accidents in Rio de Janeiro’s rough outskirts — Adriana de Souza Queiroz, 26, dead after a clandestine abortion went wrong. Queiroz, who scraped a living handing out pamphlets and was 3 or 4 months pregnant, last month became one of the some 300 Brazilian women who die each year after back street abortions.
The issue of abortion in the world’s most populous Roman Catholic country has been thrust into the spotlight by a presidential election in which front-running candidate Dilma Rousseff has been punished by religious voters for her past support for decriminalizing the procedure.
Abortion rights groups have long argued the law does little to prevent abortions in Brazil and mostly hurts poor women who can’t afford safer, expensive underground clinics.
The health ministry says that about one in seven Brazilian women under 40 have had at least one abortion and about a third of all pregnancies end in the procedure. That is in line with the rest of Latin America, which has among the world’s highest abortion rates despite it being mostly illegal, and compares to about a fifth in the United States, where abortion is legal.
When President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva came to power in 2003, many believed Brazil’s strict abortion laws could be liberalized. But with both Rousseff of the ruling Workers’ Party and her opposition rival Jose Serra now vying ahead of the Oct. 31 runoff election to convince voters of their “respect for life” and opposition to decriminalization, any reform may now be off the agenda for years.
Brazil “values voters” go YouTube against prez hopeful Rousseff
The YouTube video that helped push Brazil’s presidential election to a second round begins with Paschoal Piragine solemnly telling his flock: “In 30 years as a pastor, I’ve never done this before.” He then warns them that the ruling Workers’ Party wants not only to legalize abortion, but would make divorce easier, permit the spread of pornography, and continue to allow tribes in the Amazon to bury alive “thousands of children.”
The video, which includes disturbing images and has received nearly 3 million views, concludes with the Baptist preacher telling his followers not to vote for the Workers’ Party in upcoming elections. “Otherwise, God will judge our land,” Piragine says.
The last-minute doubts of many evangelical Christian and Catholic voters probably cost Workers’ Party presidential candidate Dilma Rousseff an outright first-round victory in last Sunday’s election, polls suggest. The shift is unlikely to keep Rousseff from winning an October 31 runoff vote against her nearest contender, opposition leader Jose Serra.
Yet the twice-divorced former Marxist guerrilla, who in past interviews has questioned the existence of God and supported greater abortion rights, will face enduring scrutiny from an increasingly powerful bloc of “values voters” that could prove a major source of opposition if she takes office.
The election could signal a sea change in Brazil’s politics in which social issues begin to trump economic ones for some voters as the country enjoys an unprecedented run of growth. Rousseff could also face constant resistance to her agenda from a faith-based movement or party in the same way that Democratic Party presidents have in the United States since the 1990s.
“I just don’t trust her, and I’m not sure I ever will,” Piragine told Reuters by telephone. “There are a lot of us who will continue to oppose her agenda if she’s president.”
Rousseff courts Brazil’s faith voters with “for life” comments
Brazil’s ruling party candidate Dilma Rousseff is playing up her Roman Catholic background in efforts to win back religious voters, whose doubts about her faith and position on abortion rights may have cost her an outright victory in Sunday’s presidential election.
In a surprise shift, many religious voters who oppose abortion, especially evangelical Christians, abandoned Rousseff’s center-left Workers’ Party to vote for the Green Party’s Marina Silva, who captured an unexpectedly large 19 percent of the vote.
“Personally, I’m from a Catholic family. I am and always was in favor of life,” Rousseff told reporters on Tuesday outside of her campaign headquarters in Brasilia. “I have no problem addressing the religious issue. My project addresses all the religions.”
She did not elaborate. Internet videos in recent weeks showed Rousseff, a former leftist guerrilla leader, apparently favoring the decriminalization of abortion, which is illegal in most cases.
Evangelical Christians are growing in influence in Brazil and now make up about 20 percent of the population in the overwhelmingly Catholic country.
Ms President Dilma Rousseff is right about abortion in Brazil. It’s completely hypocritical to hide the truth of the fact that millions of very poor, illiterate, unemployed Brazilian women are undergoing abortion in Brazil every year, in the most chaotic conditions. Of course, being right and aware of reality in our country, Ms. Rousseff is in favour of legalization and provision of concrete health care conditions offered freely by the government to these Brazilian women who cannot afford to raise a child or the abortion procedure itself. Our country is full of beggars who were brought to the world by these needy, resourceless women, who are better off undegoing abortion, and their to be children are also better off not coming to the world to suffer and hunger.
Ms. Rousseff is an intelligent, educated, experienced, realistic woman and knows best what less privileged women in our country needs. These ridiculous so-called religious people do not support the millions of newly-born babies who starve from an early age and have no other choice in life other than become a criminal in their teens. These not aborted children are killing and robbing us from the middle-class all over Brazil. This a horror, sad chain that must be broken with the interruption of pregnancy and / or contraceptive procedure in the first place.
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Resident FaithWorld Expert
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