Capitalist Leads Leftist for Brazil’s Presidency : South America: The winner will inherit a severe economic crisis. The annual rate of inflation is 13,000%.

RIO DE JANEIRO —  Brazil’s citizens Sunday picked a new president by direct ballot for the first time in 29 years, and exit polls showed Fernando Collor de Mello, a champion of private enterprise, leading Luis Inacio Lula da Silva, an advocate of socialism.

Final official results of this runoff election in Latin America’s biggest nation were expected today or Tuesday.

Brazil’s leading opinion polling firm, Ibope, said that its exit poll gave Collor 52% of valid votes cast by those interviewed, with Lula receiving 46%. Another exit poll, by Vox Populi, came up with identical results, and a third, by DataFolha, showed Collor with 51.5% and Lula with 48.5%.

Voter preference polls on the eve of the election had indicated a close contest. Results of a Gallup survey gave 44.9% to Collor and 44.4% to Lula, while 5.1% of those interviewed said they were undecided and 5% said they would cast blank or invalidated ballots.

The winner is scheduled to take office March 15, succeeding Jose Sarney, who has governed as transitional president since the end of a 21-year military regime in 1985.

Long before the polls closed Sunday, many Brazilians took to the streets to cheer for their candidates, waving red flags for Lula and green and yellow ones for Collor. The two candidates voiced cheerful optimism after casting their own ballots.

“I believe the results will be much better than we could imagine,” said Collor, 40. Lula, 44, said that losing was “something that I see as highly impossible.”

Behind the election day euphoria loomed an economic crisis that has pushed Brazilian inflation to an estimated annual rate of 13,000%. Some politicians and economists have called for advancing the presidential inauguration from March to January so that the new administration’s economic program can be put in place as soon as possible.

Economists agree that Sarney’s administration, after failing in several attempts to reduce inflation, lacks the credibility needed for a serious new attempt. Social Democratic Congressman Jose Serra, who is an economist, said in an interview published Sunday that the next president’s first anti-inflation efforts will be crucial.

“The new government will come in like someone with a revolver and one bullet who is facing a ferocious tiger,” Serra said. “He cannot miss his shot.”

The big fear in Brazil is hyper-inflation and economic chaos. In their campaigns, both Lula and Collor promised energetic measures to slow inflation, but both have withheld details of their plans.

Collor, tall and slim, studied economics at the University of Brasilia and journalism at the Federal University of Alagoas. He owns a newspaper, a television station and a radio station in the state of Alagoas and also has business interests in Rio de Janeiro, where he spent most of his childhood and youth.

He calls himself a centrist reformer. But leftist politicians call him a rightist, arguing that his election would perpetuate in power the same upper-class elite they say has dominated Brazil at the expense of the poor majority since a military coup in 1964.

Lula has advocated widespread agrarian reform, a project popular with leftists, and “privatization” of many government-run corporations, a favorite conservative cause.

He has called for renegotiation of Brazil’s $112-billion foreign debt, but he has cautioned against a hostile confrontation with foreign creditors.

The cornerstone of Collor’s campaign was his opposition to President Sarney. But as a congressman in the early 1980s, Collor belonged to the political party that Sarney headed as chairman and that supported the military government in power from 1964 to 1985.

At the end of military rule in 1985, both Collor and Sarney switched to the Brazilian Democratic Movement Party, which had opposed the regime. In 1986, after a price-control program imposed by Sarney stifled inflation temporarily and sparked a consumer buying boom, Collor rode the governing party’s bandwagon to election victory as governor of Alagoas, a small state with a population of about 2.3 million people.

Inflation soon came back at a gallop. Collor quit the official party and formed the Youth Party, later renamed the National Reconstruction Party.

Collor first won national notice in 1987 when he led a publicity crusade against members of a bureaucratic elite who take advantage of special pay differentials and bonuses to earn unusually high salaries.

The privileged bureaucrats, called “maharajahs,” offended the sensibilities of millions of Brazilians whose low wages were being eaten away by inflation.

Lula, bearded and stocky, was born in the northeastern state of Pernambuco and grew up in an impoverished, fatherless family in Sao Paulo, Brazil’s industrial hub. He quit grade school to work in a metal shop and later became a lathe operator.

In 1975, he was elected president of of the Metalworkers Union of Sao Bernardo, an industrial suburb of Sao Paulo. As a leader of strikes in the late 1970s, Lula became known nationally as a leftist opponent of the unpopular military government.

He helped found the Marxist-oriented Workers’ Party in 1980 and a national labor union federation in 1981.

In 1982, he finished fourth in an election for the Sao Paulo state governorship. He won election to the national Congress in 1986.

In this year’s campaign, he promised to suspend payments on Brazil’s foreign debt, redistribute land to peasants and strengthen government control over “essential industries” such as steel and public transportation.

He ran for the presidency under an alliance with the Brazilian Socialist Party and the Communist Party of Brazil, a splinter of the Brazilian Communist Party. The latter and two Social Democratic parties also supported him in the runoff campaign.

Collor and Lula were the finalists from a field of 21 candidates who ran in the first-round election Nov. 15.

About 88% of Brazil’s 82 million registered voters went to the polls in the first round. Turnout was reported to be lighter in Sunday’s runoff.

Sarney said Sunday that the day was historic for “one of the great democratic nations of the world.”

“Today is a day when we reach the end of a long process of democratic transition during these five years,” Sarney said, adding: “My successor is going to go through the problems we have gone through. I hope he has the support that, unhappily, I could not get.”