BBC Online :
The Brazilian environmentalist Marina Silva, who came third in Sunday’s presidential election, has backed opposition centrist candidate Aecio Neves in the second round.
Neves won 33.5% of the votes in the first round to 41.5% for President Dilma Rousseff, who is running for a second four-year term.
Silva failed to qualify for the 26 October run-off, with 21.3%.
She cited Neves’s “commitments” as the reason for supporting him.
On Saturday, he announced in an open letter to the nation that he would include in his
manifesto issues such as land reform, the demarcation of indigenous lands, the rights of rural communities and environmental concerns.
Those issues formed a key part of Silva’s campaign.
When in a similar position four years ago, Marina Silva chose not to endorse any of the remaining two candidates and took a back seat as Dilma Rousseff went on to win the election, succeeding President Lula.
And while Marina is unlikely to play a prominent, visible role in Aecio Neves’s campaign, her endorsement is a big boost to his bid for the presidency and will add to the perception that, after 12 years of unbroken PT [Workers Party] rule, the rest of Brazil is ready for change.
Marina Silva posed such a threat to Dilma Rousseff in the early part of the campaign that the incumbent’s tactic was to attack her opponent’s policies and her character. It was an offensive which Marina was unable to turn on its head and was partly the reason why she fell away so badly before the first round of voting.
So although Dilma and Marina should, theoretically, be ideologically close having served as ministers in Lula’s government, their personal animosity meant that Marina’s support for Aecio was almost a “given”.
Brazil’s opinion polls will probably reflect this news with an even bigger lead for the PSDB candidate over President Rousseff, but the polls are notoriously volatile and should not be taken as any indicator how the voting will go on 26 October.
“I prefer to be criticised for my actions while fighting for what I believe in and for what is best for Brazil,” she said.
Silva, who grew up in a poor family of rubber tappers in the Amazon, is a former environment minister.
She fell out with the Workers Party government now led by Rousseff and eventually founded her own political movement, Rede Sustentabilidade (Sustainability Network).
