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Venezuelans went to the polls over the weekend to vote in National Assembly elections that were largely peaceful and uneventful. At stake was the ruling party’s two thirds majority which had enabled President Hugo Chavez to quickly pass laws. According to the results released yesterday, that super-majority was lost, although Chavez’s party still won a majority of seats – at least 96 out of 165. The opposition coalition, which boycotted the last election, now controls at least 61 seats, which is more than a third. However, Chavez remains popular throughout the country, especially in rural areas. He himself faces re-election in two years. Meanwhile Venezuela’s southern neighbor, Brazil, is gearing up for its own elections. On Sunday, voters in the fifth largest country in the world will choose their new President. Brazil has a two-term limit for Presidents, forcing the highly popular Ignacio Lula Da Silva to step down. His handpicked successor Dilma Rousseff, who served as his cabinet chief, is leading by a wide margin in the polls and will likely win in the first round of elections on October 3rd. Her main rival is Jose Serra, head of the conservative Brazilian Social Democracy Party who lost to Lula in earlier elections, and has only about half the electorate’s support. Lula has been credited with lifting 28 million Brazilians out of poverty and cutting in half the number of people who regularly go hungry, during his nearly 8 years in office.

GUEST: Mark Weisbrot, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, he is a columnist for the Guardian Newspaper in London, and for Folha de Sao Paulo, Brazil’s largest newspaper, and Board president of Just Foreign Policy

Find out more about Mark Weisbrot’s work at www.cepr.net.