Buoyant Brazil gets first woman president

With more than 94 per cent of the ballot papers counted, she had 55.5 per cent of the vote against 44.5 per cent for opposition candidate Jose Serra. She will be sworn in as president on 1 January.

The election completed an unlikely journey for Ms Rousseff that took her from jail and torture by her military captors in the 1970s to the country's highest office.

An economist and former energy minister who leans towards the Left but has become more pragmatic over time, she had never run for elected office.

Yet she received decisive support from Brazil's wildly popular president, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who plucked her from relative obscurity to succeed him.

"I think she will continue Lula's work," said Elizabete Gomes da Silva, a factory worker in Sao Paulo. "He governed for the people who needed him most - the poorest."

During Mr Lula's eight years in office, his stable fiscal policies and social programmes helped lift 20 million Brazilians, or more than 10 per cent of the population, out of poverty.

The burgeoning middle class is snapping up cars and building houses at a pace never seen before, helping to make Brazil a rare bright spot in the global economy along with China and India.

That legacy was simply too much for Mr Serra to overcome. He mustered just enough support in the first round of voting on 3 October to force a run-off, and briefly closed in on Ms Rousseff in subsequent polls.

But she pulled away in the final two weeks as the focus shifted away from her views on social issues such as abortion and back to Mr Lula's economic record.

As Mr Lula's former chief of staff, she vows to build on his successes by upgrading Brazil's roads, schools and other infrastructure as the country prepares to host the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympic Games.

She also seeks to exploit the country's new-found offshore oil wealth.