RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) – Brazil’s once humdrum presidential race now resembles one of the country’s famed soap operas, with a newcomer thrust into the spotlight by a plane crash and the longtime favorite reeling from a one-two punch of bad news.
With just over a month to go before the Oct. 5 vote, President Dilma Rousseff awoke to newspaper headlines Saturday announcing that Brazil’s long-sputtering economy had officially entered recession for the first time in more than five years.
Worse for her, perhaps, were the other banner headlines splashed on front pages: A poll showing Rousseff trailing her new rival Marina Silva by 10 percentage points if the election goes, as expected, to a second round.
“Yesterday must have been President Dilma’s most difficult day in a long time – she only had awful news,” wrote Merval Pereira, a political columnist for the O Globo newspaper.
Silva was a peripheral figure in the election until Aug. 13, when a campaign plane crash killed Socialist Party candidate Eduardo Campos, who was running third, far behind Rousseff.