Brazilian presidential candidate Jose Serra is targeting religious voters as he closes a 14- percentage point gap with Dilma Rousseff ahead of a runoff election later this month.

While Brazil is famous for skimpy bikinis and naked carnival dancers, church attendance and faith-based voting are on the rise in Latin America’s biggest economy. The number of Brazilians who identify themselves as evangelical Christians has increased to 24 percent this year from 19 percent in 2002, when President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva was elected, according to Sao Paulo-based polling firm Datafolha. Both candidates are courting this growing constituency by visiting churches and canvassing for votes with religious leaders.

Serra has benefitted more from the trend after Rousseff’s past statements on abortion led some Christians to view her with suspicion, said Rafael Cortez, a political scientist at Tendencias Consultoria Integrada. The issue has shifted the debate away from the economy, where Rousseff has an advantage after she served as cabinet chief for Lula’s government, which lifted 21 million people out of poverty, he said.

“This blocked her victory in the first round and could even impede her victory at the end of October,” Cortez said in a telephone interview in Sao Paulo.

Serra had 47.7 percent support, trailing Rousseff by 4.6 percentage points, in a Sensus poll of 2,000 people published today. The Oct. 11-13 poll had a margin of error of 2.2 percentage points. Rousseff won 47 percent of the first-round vote on Oct. 3, compared with 33 percent for Serra and 19 percent for the Green Party’s Marina Silva, an evangelical Christian.

Silva’s ability to attract more votes than polls had predicted has led both campaigns to seek support among her backers, some of whom identify with her anti-abortion views.

Saying Mass

At an Oct. 11 rally in Goais state, Serra was accompanied by a priest in his open car and he used the image of a sonogram and newborn baby in a television advertisement.

Rousseff told 51 evangelical Christian leaders in Brasilia yesterday that she would veto any attempt to legalize abortion or gay marriage if elected on Oct. 31, according to Marcelo Crivella, an evangelical pastor and pro-government senator who attended the meeting. After attending mass on Oct. 11, she told reporters that her faith helped her overcome a battle with lymphatic cancer last year.

The two candidates clashed over abortion in their first head-to-head debate Oct. 10. Serra criticized Rousseff’s comments in a videotaped interview from July, circulated on the Internet, that abortion must be treated as a “public health issue” rather than a religious one.

‘Two-Faced’

“You clearly said you were in favor of legalizing abortion and then you said the opposite,” Serra, 68, said. “It’s about being coherent, and not two-faced, saying one thing and then another.”

The 62-year-old Rousseff, in response, accused Serra’s campaign of “slander” and of falsely accusing her of favoring killing babies.

Brazil’s current abortion law, which both candidates say they support, allows pregnancy to be terminated only if it results from rape or it puts the mother’s life at risk.

Brazil has the world’s largest Roman Catholic population, and the second-largest number of Christians after the U.S. Brazil’s evangelical population has risen since the 2000 census, when Roman Catholics were 74 percent of the population and evangelicals 15 percent, said Paul Freston, author of “Evangelicals and Politics in Asia, Africa and Latin America.”

As church attendance has grown, evangelicals have been taking a bigger role in business and politics, Freston said. Crivella’s church, the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, is the owner of Brazil’s second-biggest television network, Rede Record.

Evangelical Caucus

The evangelical caucus will control 63 of 512 seats in the lower house when the next Congress is sworn in, according to estimates by the Inter-Union Parliamentary Advisory Department, a Brasilia-based policy group that follows congress.

As the race narrows, outreach to religious voters could become more decisive and the debate over abortion more heated, according to Paulo Sotero, director of the Brazil Institute at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington.

“Although most Brazilians will not vote because of abortion, 5 percent to 10 percent of them may,” Sotero said in a phone interview. “That may be enough to move the election in one direction or the other.”

Source: Bloomberg