Green Brazil

Marina Silva has the classic biography of a Brazilian left-wing hero - born in the Amazonian state of Acre, the daughter of rubber-pickers, illiterate until she was sixteen - but she is also an evangelical Christian. As such, she is fiercely opposed to abortion, and a substantial portion of her vote came from Christians who were horrified by Dilma's advocacy of reform in Brazil's stern anti-abortion laws.

As a social conservative, Marina might even try to throw her votes to Serra. She is wringing every drop of drama out of the situation, and won't announce her choice until a special party convention late next week.

Fifty million Brazilians have been rescued from poverty (an income of less than $82 per month) by Lula's "family plan" of subsidies for the very poor, and 25 million other low-income Brazilians have actually ascended into the middle class. So Lula leaves office after eight years with a stratospheric approval rating of 80 percent.

Brazil is the only one of the BRICs, the big countries with high economic growth rates, to have both a powerful industrial sector (like India and China) and self-sufficiency in energy (like Russia). By the time it hosts the Olympic Games in 2016, it will probably have the fifth-largest economy in the world.