President Dilma Rousseff has promised to re-unite Brazil after narrowly winning re-election to a second term in office with 51.6% of the vote. She said “dialogue” would be her top priority after a bitterly fought campaign against center-right candidate Aecio Neves, who got 48.4% of the vote.
Although she faced mass protests last year against corruption and poor services, Rousseff, who has been in power since 2010, remains popular with poor Brazilians thanks to her government’s welfare programmes.
The vote split Latin America’s biggest country almost evenly in two, along lines of social class and geography, BBC reports. While Dilma Rousseff did well in the poorer northern states, her opponent from the Brazilian Social Democracy Party (PSDB) took many of the wealthier and more developed southern parts of Brazil.