Brazil's leftist President Dilma Rousseff has won a first-round election and will face business favourite Aecio Neves in what is shaping up to be a hard-fought runoff.
With nearly all ballots counted, Rousseff had 41 per cent of the vote and Neves 34 per cent, leaving popular environmentalist Marina Silva - who once looked set to become Brazil's first black president - relegated with 21 per cent.
The incumbent, who is looking to win a second four-year term and extend 12 years of Workers' Party (PT) government, is the favourite three weeks out from the October 26 runoff.
But Neves, an ex-governor with a reputation as a smooth operator, has momentum in his favour after fending off the once unstoppable-looking Silva and finishing the first round well above the 27-per cent support pollsters had given him on the eve of the vote.
After a campaign packed with all the twists and turns of a telenovela - a candidate's death in a fiery plane crash, a poor maid's rise to the cusp of the presidency, a seedy oil scandal - the election produced a traditional-looking second round between the two parties that have led the world's seventh-largest economy for the past 20 years.
But Neves, the scion of a powerful political family, vowed to carry the mantle of "change", the buzzword of the campaign after four years of economic slowdown, corruption allegations, frustration with poor public services and record spending to host the World Cup.
He made an emotional appeal to Silva's Socialist party supporters, whose electoral race was thrown into turmoil on August 13 when their original candidate, Eduardo Campos, was killed in a plane crash.
Silva, his runningmate, took Campos's place and initially leapt in the polls with her broad-based appeal.
But despite her compelling personal story - a one-time maid, she rose from illiteracy and poverty to become a respected conservation activist, senator and environment minister - she lost steam in the last month of the campaign.
Neves paid warm tribute to Campos and told Socialist voters: "It's time to unite our forces."
The election, the closest in a generation for Latin America's largest democracy, is widely seen as a referendum on PT rule.
The party endeared itself to the masses with landmark social programs and an economic boom in the 2000s that have lifted 40 million Brazilians from poverty, increased wages and brought unemployment to a near-record low.
But Rousseff, 66, has presided over rising inflation and, since January, a recession, as well as million-strong protests last year against corruption and poor education, health care and transport.
Rousseff, a former guerilla who was jailed and tortured for fighting the country's 1964-1985 dictatorship, has also been battered in recent weeks by a corruption scandal implicating dozens of politicians - mainly her allies - at state-owned oil giant Petrobras.
All the main candidates have vowed to protect the PT's popular welfare programs.
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