SAO PAULO, Brazil - They lit fireworks, danced the samba and waved flags emblazoned with the red star, but Brazil's left scored only a partial victory in a presidential race that now goes to a second round.
Unable to win a weekend election outright, former labor boss Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva is headed for an Oct. 27 showdown with the second-place finisher, government-backed candidate Jose Serra.
"Let us go wage the fight, let's go to the streets immediately!" said Jose Geonino, one of Silva's closest aides, as he rallied more than 1,000 cheering supporters of the leftist Workers' Party candidate after Sunday's ballot. "I call for the vote of all who want to change Brazil."
With 90.3 percent of the ballot counted, Silva finished with 46.7 percent and Serra with 23.6 percent, the Supreme Electoral Tribunal said. Eliminated in the first round voting were former Rio state Gov. Anthony Garotinho with 17 percent, followed by former finance minister Ciro Gomes with 12.1 percent.
Silva's campaign announced it would immediately begin hunting for votes from Garotinho, who had strong support from evangelical groups, and from Gomes, a center-leftist seen as sympathetic to Silva.
All told, more than three quarters of the electorate rebuffed the government candidate Serra and the free market policies he vowed to continue from outgoing President Fernando Henrique Cardoso.
"There is disillusionment with free market policies" being highlighted by this election, said political scientist David Fleischer, an American teaching at the University of Brasilia.
He said that discontent is not confined to Brazil, but is part of a region-wide dissatisfaction with unbridled free markets from crisis-ridden Argentina and Uruguay on Brazil's south to Peru and Ecuador on the west.
For many, Silva also represents a challenge to a Free Trade Area of the Americas, a U.S.-backed effort to link up the hemisphere in the world's largest free trade bloc by 2005. Silva has said the FTAA is Washington's "annexation plan of Latin America."
But if financial markets abroad openly worried about a leftist winning elected office for the first time in Brazil in nearly 40 years, many here openly embraced the man as a catalyst for change in a country rife with poverty, hunger and a growing gap between rich and poor.
"Lula! Luuuu-laaa!" people shouted in Sao Paulo, Silva's home turf, rallying into the early hours Monday amid a barrage of fireworks after a compulsory ballot by 115.3 million registered voters.
Francisco Pereira, whose foot had to be amputated last year because of diabetes, limped to the polls from his dusty shantytown slum, Villa Prudente, the city's largest and most violent "favela."
"Things are bleak," said Pereira, 49, hobbling on splintered crutches after punching in his vote on a computer in a public school whose green chalkboard was pitted and worn from years of use.
Like millions in Brazil, he said Silva was the workers' candidate and would look kindly on the fate of the poor, the unemployed and those in ill health. "I hope a lot from him."
The economy grew 1.5 percent last year and is forecast to finish 2002 with growth of 1.4 percent. But the weak economy, coupled with an unemployment rate of 8 percent, have turned millions of Brazilians against free-market policies and the government candidate Serra.
Brazil, weighed down by US$230 billion in foreign debt, saw its currency in a freefall in recent weeks over its ability to keep up debt obligations and also adjust to a possible Silva victory.
Trying to allay market fears, Silva pledged to honor Brazil's debt and abide by terms of a US$30 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund ( news - web sites).
He said his concern is boosting exports and creating jobs, bringing Brazil's poor millions into the consuming mainstream — not a populist revolution like President Hugo Chavez attempted in Venezuela.
And he has drastically softened his radical rhetoric to attract votes from the center and rack up his biggest election victory after three failed presidential attempts since 1989. His running mate is a textile magnate with factories employing 16,000 workers.
At Serra headquarters, where the atmosphere changed from depression to elation, people were celebrating as if their candidate had won.
A 60-year-old economist, Serra was expected to urge voters to cast ballots for "experience," citing his service in Congress and the Senate before becoming health minister to Cardoso.
He told reporters he also would try to attract women voters, recalling how as health minister he stopped public hospitals from refusing painkillers to women in labor.
"Today is better than yesterday," he said. "And tomorrow will be better than today."
One Serra aide, Wilma Motta, pledged the government candidate will "show the real face" of Silva's Workers Party.
Silva, 56, was jailed as a subversive in the 80s for leading strikes that challenged the military dictatorship of the time. In this campaign, the former firebrand orator and union organizer has shed his radical image, and is now perceived by many as a moderate.
Some Silva supporters worried the next round would be the most vicious.
Vitor Hugo Simoes, a 41-year-old school teacher, was crushed that the leftist didn't clinch an outright victory.
"I am so saddened. I was so sure he would win in one round," Simoes said.
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