Lula's a hard act to follow as Brazilians go to the polls

Night was falling on Rio's Ipanema beach. Inside the Londra bar at the upmarket Fasano hotel, waiters were making the final adjustments before opening the city's most exclusive nightspot.

The bar staff weaved between Sex Pistols-inspired Philippe Starck armchairs shipped in from France. Behind an immaculate bar, stocked with glowing bottles of 12-year-old Glenlivet whisky and buckets of Veuve Clicquot, the cocktail chief showed off his latest creation - a Martini Bloody Mary topped with scarlet foam.

"This is a 'sceney' place: a place to see and be seen," said Paula Bezerra de Mello, head of PR at what is generally thought to be Rio's most sophisticated hotel. It was, she said, part of the "new luxury" of the Lula era.

As a former trade unionist, Brazil's hugely popular President, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, is best known for helping his country's poor during an eight-year reign that is entering its final moments.

According to the Government, more than 20 million Brazilians have been hauled out of poverty since Lula came to power. But the rich have not done badly either.

With the economy once again on the move and the Olympics and World Cup on the way, there is a certain something in the Rio air right now; a swagger that can be felt not only in Ipanema's luxurious nightspots, but also in the city's impoverished slum favelas and remote Amazonian towns where shopping centres and cinemas are sprouting from the ground with growing pace.

"There is a greater excitement, an optimism," said Rogerio Fasano, Brazil's most revered hotelier and restaurateur, who studied film-making in London and conceived Londra as an Italian-tinged homage to his former home.

"I feel that people are seeing Brazil in a different way - not just in terms of tourism, but in terms of business," he said.

Many, though not all, attribute this upbeat mood and palpable self-confidence to Lula. According to a poll last week, Lula will leave office after two terms with an approval rating of an astronomical 81 per cent.

Today the curtains will begin to go down on the "era Lula". Unless the presidential race is forced into a second round, Brazilians will discover who will pick up where Lula left off.

If polls are to be believed, Lula's successor will be Dilma Rousseff, a former student rebel who rose to be Lula's chief of staff after spending three years in jail under the former military dictatorship. She has a reputation as a respected enforcer entrusted to lead the soon-to-be-ex President's gigantic economic growth programme, pumping billions into social programmes and infrastructure works.

The new President officially takes over on January 1, 2011. But between now and then historians will pore over one central question: how did Brazil's first working-class leader achieve such a startlingly vibrant legacy?

Few understand the transformations that Brazil has undergone under Lula more than one of the President's namesakes, a woman who was raised in Chapeu-Mangueira, a Copacabana favela around 10 minutes' drive from Londra, and who has witnessed up close the changes in Brazil's most deprived corners.

"[As a child] I didn't have water. I didn't have electricity. I didn't have a comfortable brick home. Today these projects are arriving in the communities," she said during a campaign event in Nova Iguacu.

Lula's support is not universal. Many believe Lula's success, and the country's growing prosperity, owes more to the commodities boom than to any personal merit and warn a growing government deficit threatens to cause a headache in coming years.

Others attribute Brazil's recent boom to Lula's predecessor, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, who helped stabilise the country's erratic economy in the early 1990s and, perhaps understandably, feels somewhat aggrieved at the lack of recognition.

"I did the reforms. Lula surfed the wave," Cardoso told the Financial Times recently.

- Observer