Ruling party candidate Rousseff wins Brazil presidential election

Ruling party candidate Rousseff wins Brazil presidential election

2010-11-01 07:20:52 GMT+7 (ICT)

BRASILIA (BNO NEWS) -- Brazil's former Chief of Staff Dilma Rousseff of the ruling Worker's Party received the most votes on Sunday's presidential election, the country's electoral tribunal said.

With more than 99 percent of the votes counted, Rousseff had 55.96 percent of the vote. Jose Serra of the Brazilian Social Democracy Party was in second place with 44.01 percent.

Rousseff became the first woman elected president of the South American giant, and from January 2011 she will replace President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, her mentor and political godfather.

Rousseff, 62, is a former guerrilla leader that fought against the military dictatorship that ruled the country from 1964 to 1985. She was imprisoned and tortured in the early 1970s.

She is daughter of a Bulgarian-born poet-businessman and a Brazilian schoolteacher, served several offices as provincial minister in the finance, energy, mining and communications fields in Rio Grande do Sul state in the 1980s and 1990s.

Nicknamed 'The Iron Lady', she joined Lula's Workers' Party in 2001. When Lula took office in 2003, she was named mining and energy minister. Rousseff, who has one child, became Lula's Chief of Staff in 2005.

Jose Serra, 68, a social democrat, was making his second bid for the Brazilian Presidency. The former senator, and both former mayor and former governor of Brazil’s powerful Sao Paulo state, went up against Lula unsuccessfully in 2002.

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