Tense election day for Brazil's tarnished Lula

SAO PAULO, Brazil, Oct 1: President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva's standing as a man of the people may not be enough to carry him to victory when Brazilians vote in a presidential election today.

It will be an anxious day for the former factory worker and his followers. With the opposition flaying him for his party's sleazy politics, the first-round win that only a few weeks ago seemed a certainty is rapidly slipping from his grasp.

Two polls released yesterday night, the last before the first round, showed for the first time in the campaign that Lula could fall short of the more than 50 per cent of the vote needed to hand him a second term today.

Failure to win an absolute majority would mean voters going back to the ballot box in a runoff on October 29 -- prolonging an already poisonous political scene in the world's fourth-largest democracy.

''It's no longer a sure thing anymore,'' said one Lula aide as the president worked the crowd at a car factory in an industrial suburb of Sao Paulo.

About 125 million Brazilians are due to vote, from hamlets in the Amazon jungle to the skyscrapers of the megalopolis Sao Paulo, the violent slums of Rio de Janeiro to the prosperous farmlands of the south.

Polls show the 60-year-old Lula, who rose from shining shoes in city streets to the leadership of Latin America's largest country, has a dwindling lead over his nearest rival Geraldo Alckmin of the centrist Brazilian Social Democracy Party, or PSDB.

Lula's support is based on a rising wages, a sound economy, and social welfare programs that have benefited millions of poor in this country of 185 million people.

But a string of corruption scandals involving his ruling Workers' Party has dashed the promise of a bright new dawn in Brazilian politics after he swept to power in 2003.

Revelations two weeks ago his campaign staff tried to buy information for a smear campaign against Alckmin and others gave the opposition new ammunition to go on the attack.

''The problem of Brazil is not the elite, as my adversary says,'' Alckmin said on Saturday. ''The problem is Lula's gang.'' 'THIS HAS ALWAYS EXISTED' On the campaign trail, Lula has attacked the rich and promised to keep up the struggle for social justice -- sounding much more like the firebrand factory union leader of the old days than the pragmatic moderate who won the confidence of Wall Street in his first four years in office.

His folksy charm still works among his grass-roots support.

''We are 100 per cent with Lula,'' said Antonio Bernanbau, 38, a worker at the Daimler Chrysler plant in Sao Bernado do Campo, which Lula visited on Friday. ''He represents the workers of this country and our hopes.'' He and his friend Wellington Gonzales, both dressed in oil-stained gray overalls, said salaries were better and they had more work. They earn about 13 reais (6 dollars) an hour for a 40-hour week. Gonzales had been able to put money down on a new house, he said.

As for the corruption and sleaze: ''They didn't prove anything.

This has always existed,'' Gonzales said.

Most of Brazil's rich have always looked down on Lula with snobbish disdain. But all the dirty politics may have prompted middle-class voters to turn their backs on him, analysts said.

Lula was a caricature of the dynamic, charismatic figure of before, the Washington-based Council on Hemispheric Affairs said in a pre-election analysis.

''No longer can he rely on his incorruptible image, his warm, and fuzzy style, his engaging bear hugs and rhetorical embraces to automatically do his work for him,'' it said.

REUTERS