RIO DE JANEIRO: Brazilians narrowly voted leftist President Dilma Rousseff back into office Sunday for a second term after a bitter election campaign that split Latin America's biggest economy largely between the poor north and richer south.
Rousseff, Brazil's first woman president, went into the run-off as slight favorite -- despite overseeing economic recession -- and defeated center-right challenger Aecio Neves by three million ballots for a vote share of 51.6 percent after 99 percent of the count.
Handsomely ahead in the north, Rousseff crucially picked up enough middle-class votes in the more prosperous southeast to cement a fourth straight win for her Workers Party (PT).
The 66-year-old daughter of a Bulgarian immigrant businessman immediately vowed to work for political reform through dialogue and to give Brazil the change she said she recognized voters wanted.
"The most important reform is political. This president is open to dialogue. This is the top priority of my second mandate," Rousseff, standing alongside two-term predecessor Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, told ecstatic supporters in the capital Brasilia.
After four years of sluggish economic growth culminating in recession, she admitted her own report card had to improve and vowed to combat corruption.
"I want to be a much better president than I have been to date," she told the rally, issuing "a call for peace and unity" after a vitriolic campaign of low blows and mutual recriminations.
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