#DILMA Brazil's Evangelicals Courted

By PAULO PRADA

SÃO PAULO, Brazil—Brazil's ruling party finds itself courting an ascendant evangelical vote that on Sunday helped spoil an expected first-round victory for Dilma Rousseff, the would-be successor to President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

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Associated Press

Dilma Rousseff, the front-runner in Brazil's presidential race, at a news conference in Brasilia Monday. Her Workers Party is wooing religious voters.

As the leftist Workers Party regroups ahead of an Oct. 31 runoff, it wants to guarantee Ms. Rousseff maintains a significant advantage over her rival, José Serra, the centrist former governor of São Paulo state.

Having gone into the vote with opinion polls suggesting she could clinch the election in one round, Ms. Rousseff failed to garner the majority required to do so, reaping 47% of the vote, compared with Mr. Serra's 33%.

To win back its momentum, the party is scrambling to lure back evangelical voters who defected to other candidates late last week.

Many religious voters withdrew their support for Ms. Rousseff after an aggressive Internet campaign convinced them that the candidate favors legalized abortion.

The effort to woo those voters marks the first time that Brazil's fast-growing evangelical community has become the focus of a national election.

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Evangelicals have long had a growing voice in local and regional contests, particularly around Rio de Janeiro, but the community has only now begun to gain a critical electoral mass nationwide.

"They now have the numbers to influence the big debates," said Fernando Altemeyer Jr., a theology professor at the Catholic University of São Paulo, noting the increasingly activist role that evangelical pastors are playing in Brazilian politics.

In addition to posting the names of approved candidates in church property and in community literature, many pastors have gone into politics themselves.

"My pastor asked that we support Serra," said Debora Nascimento, a 55-year-old sociologist from São Paulo, after dutifully casting the requested vote on Sunday.

Brazil, a country of 190 million people, may have as many as 30 million evangelical Christians, compared with less than 10 million 20 years ago, according to various studies.

What is more, as Brazilians left the Catholic church for other denominations in recent decades, the demographic makeup of evangelical churches has broadened, now including parts of the middle and upper classes in addition to its original blue-collar base.

To deal with the sudden backlash, some Workers Party members have called on the party to change its official platform, which has long sought to decriminalize abortion, now illegal except in cases of rape or life-threatening danger for the mother.

The party is also reaching out to allied leaders within the church in hopes they can soothe their followers.

One tactic is to remind them that Mr. da Silva, despite the party platform, never seriously sought to decriminalize abortion because of the lack of consensus on the issue in Congress.

Ms. Rousseff "needs to stress that she would govern as a leader with everyone's interests in mind," said Marcelo Crivella, an evangelical pastor and senator allied with the Workers Party, that "she won't govern with morals that much of the electorate finds distasteful."

Ms. Rousseff in recent statements said she doesn't favor a change in Brazilian abortion law.

The concerns, however, persist because of past comments in which she publicly suggested she did.

In an April 2009 interview with the Brazilian edition of Marie Claire, a women's magazine, Ms. Rousseff lamented that any woman would ever need to have an abortion, but suggested legalization to minimize the practice of illicit abortions.

While an abortion "isn't easy for any woman," she said, "that doesn't justify that it not be legalized."

Mr. Serra, for his part, has also spoken out against loosening the current laws.

—Paulo Winterstein contributed to this article.







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