Still on top

A TWO-hour political debate scheduled to clash with an important football match, and running until midnight before a working day: unsurprisingly, the first televised debate in Brazil’s presidential election drew a tiny audience share last night. Nonetheless, it set the tone for the rest of the campaign. Although the front-runner, Dilma Rousseff of the ruling Workers’ Party, was not as impressive as her seasoned and wily challenger, José Serra of the Party of Brazilian Social Democracy, her lead still looks safe.

Ms Rousseff is the chosen successor and former chief of staff of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the current president. Thanks to Lula’s strong popularity and a rather quiet campaign from Mr Serra, she enjoys a comfortable edge in the polls even though she has never before run for political office. The debate was an important opportunity for Mr Serra to try to rattle Ms Rousseff, and to persuade Brazilians that despite Lula’s reflected glory, electing her as president would be too much of a risk.

Ms Rousseff hardly did brilliantly. She was clearly nervous and stuttered on occasion. Moreover, despite much coaching—she has reportedly been holed up with media advisors for days—she was the first participant to fall foul of the strict format of one-minute questions and two-minute answers, enforced by the producers switching off microphones. She ran out of time on her very first answer and was cut off mid-sentence. Other candidates made the same mistake, but not as early or as often. Mr Serra, for his part, made no attempt to push Ms Rousseff into a blunder.

Neither of the minor candidates made much of an impact. Marina Silva of the Green Party, who sits at around 10% in the polls, is a tiny, fragile-seeming woman, with the scraped-back hair and poise of an ex-ballet dancer. She has a back-story to rival Lula’s own—born in rural poverty and illiterate until 16, she worked as a maid to support herself while studying—and was Lula’s environment minister until 2008, when she resigned and joined the Green Party after failing to get some big infrastructure projects shelved. But like Ms Rousseff she is a relative neophyte, and it showed.

The fourth participant, Plinio Soares de Arruda Sampaio of the Socialism and Freedom Party, was the only one to throw caution to the wind. However, the 80-year-old radical socialist is polling around 1 or 2% and has nothing to lose. The only reason he took part was that rules governing campaign coverage mean candidates from parties which are represented in congress must be invited.

On the day of the debate an opinion poll gave Ms Rousseff 41%, almost ten percentage points ahead of Mr Serra, the biggest margin in a poll yet. That, says David Fleischer, a political scientist at the University of Brasília, could translate into as much as 48% in the actual election—within striking distance of the 50% she would need to avoid a run-off with Mr Serra. Other polls also put her ahead, though not by as wide a margin. Increasingly, the presidency of Brazil is looking like Ms Rousseff’s to lose. And last night, she did nothing to lose it.