Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said he will push harder in a second term to eradicate poverty, and defended his Workers Party against allegations it bribed opposition lawmakers to support his legislative agenda.
Announcing his re-election bid in Brasilia, Silva said Brazil is on an unprecedented path toward lifting tens of millions of citizens from grinding poverty and reducing the deep divide between rich and poor.
"I know there's still a lot to be done to reduce poverty and social inequality," Silva said on Saturday in the speech before supporters from the party he helped found decades ago. "But we are on the right track."
Silva, a former radical union leader during Brazil's military dictatorship, swept to power four years ago as Brazil's first working-class president on a platform of improving life for the poor.
During his speech, he acknowledged he has not done enough to raise living standards, but said he will do much more if re-elected.
"We haven't done everything we wanted to do, but we've done a lot more than some people thought was possible," Silva said.
Silva, known popularly as Lula, was hit hard politically last year by a bribes-for-votes scandal that resulted in a wave of resignations from his inner circle. He said the allegations were never proven and should not be seen as an indictment of his party, and that a political crisis generated by the accusations was overblown.
"Our opponents tried to take advantage of some situations, to give the false idea that our government condoned these illicit acts," Silva said.
Silva's pledge to ease poverty echoed key themes of his landslide 2002 campaign. Though critics say he fell short on the promises, the president enjoys widespread popularity and has boosted the economy with a conservative fiscal policy that set the nation on a path toward slow, sustainable growth.
A recent survey showed Silva would win the Oct. 1 election with 48 percent of the vote. His top challenger, former Sao Paulo state governor Geraldo Alckmin of the centrist Social Democratic Party, would receive 18 percent. But the poll showed Silva crushing Alckmin in a second round on Oct. 29, if no candidate gets 50 percent in the first round.
Silva insisted most of Brazil's poor have improved their lives considerably since he took office in January 2003 through poverty alleviation programs.
Among them is the "Bolsa Familia," which gives poor families monthly stipends to keep children in school and in after-school activities, instead of going to work.
Silva represents a radical change from Brazil's traditional upper-class leaders -- and from the 1964-1985 military regime that jailed him for leading labor strikes.
He surprised supporters by following the conservative fiscal policy he once criticized, keeping interest rates sky-high, attracting foreign capital and slowing domestic growth to pay debts and control inflation. The move paid off by making the country's typical boom-and-bust economic cycles a distant memory.
In December, Brazil also paid off its full US$15.5 billion debt with the IMF ahead of schedule to save on interest payments.
But Silva's popularity suffered last year, when former government-allied congressman Roberto Jefferson denounced an alleged kickback scheme involving more than US$23 million in undeclared bank loans taken by officials of the Workers Party.
Silva's longtime friend and powerful Chief of Staff Jose Dirceu resigned, and was expelled from Congress. Other top party officials also quit -- even though Silva denied he knew about the scheme.
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