Green Party candidate Marina Silva could hold the keys to Brazil's top elected office after scoring a surprisingly strong third place in Sunday's presidential election, analysts say.
Silva, a female former environment minister who resigned from the center-left government of outgoing President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva to run for office, won 19 percent of the vote in the poll -- far higher than the 14 percent surveys had predicted for her.
Votes for Silva likely denied a first-round victory for Dilma Rousseff, Lula's anointed successor.
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Although Silva will not participate in the October 31 runoff between Rousseff and second-ranked challenger Jose Serra, her supporters are up for grabs and could decide the race.
New phenomenon
"The phenomenon, the really new fact in these elections, is the swing to Marina," Andre Pereira Cesar, a political analyst at the CAC consulting firm, told AFP.
"From being a background figure during the whole campaign, she is now the one who could determine the presidential election in the second round," he said.
Silva, 52, late Sunday told supporters and reporters in a hoarse voice that she had waged a good fight.
"We came out of this victorious. We defended a victorious idea and Brazil heard our cry," she said.
Silva was raised as a rubber tapper with few prospects in Brazil's impoverished Amazon region, but pursued an education and entered politics. She was elected to the senate, and from there was chosen to be Lula's environment minister in 2003.
However she quit that portfolio in 2008 to protest what she saw as the government's policy of prioritizing economic development in the Amazon rainforest at the expense of conservation.
In many ways, her humble beginnings echoed those of the popular Lula, a shoeshine boy who rose to became a trade union leader and was then president on his fourth try in 2002.
That parallel and Silva's earnest discourse made a sharp contract with Rousseff, the daughter of a well-off family who had to soften her image with botox and a makeover before claiming she alone was representing Brazil's female voters.
Silva apparently also benefited from a tactic by Serra, who stalled Rousseff's rise just before Sunday's elections by tying Lula's candidate to scandals in the ruling Workers Party.
Carlos Alberto de Melo, a political analyst at the Insper Institute in Sao Paulo, told AFP the shift to Silva "was a protest vote by part of the electorate who weren't convinced by Dilma or Serra, and who finally voted for Marina to play for time and force a second round."
Second round crucial
Silva "got many more votes than the surveys said she would, and this is going to exploited a lot in the days to come," De Melo said.
"The question now is what will happen to those votes in the second round?"
Silva's votes represent "pure gold" to both Serra and Rousseff, Pereira Cesar said.
Silva, he said, "holds all the cards over the next three weeks of campaigning."
He added that Silva could force the insertion of a "new agenda into Brazilian politics," possibly in line with her environmentalist platform.
Silva has not said who she would back in the runoff vote, though she made it clear that support would depend on adopting some of her policies.
Observers however believe that many of Silva's 20 million supporters are disillusioned with Lula's government and could vote for Serra, even if Silva overcomes her animosity towards Rousseff and endorses her former rival.
"I think Dilma has more to offer Marina than Serra. Both were ministers, they've spoken before, and of course Lula is there to mediate. Everybody knows Marina and appreciates Lula. That would be a dramatic, tense and complicated conversation," Pereira Cesar said.
