Re-elected Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff delivers a speech following her WIN, in Brasilia on October 26, 2014. AFP PHOTO | EVARISTO SA 
RIO DE JANEIRO
Brazil's leftist President Dilma Rousseff narrowly won re-election to a second term Sunday, calling for unity after the most divisive race since the return to democracy in 1985.
Rousseff, the first woman president of the world's seventh-largest economy, took 51.64 per cent of the vote to 48.36 per cent for business favorite Aecio Neves, election officials said with more than 99 per cent of ballots counted.
After a vitriolic campaign that largely split the country between the poor north and wealthier south, Rousseff crucially PICKED UP enough middle-class votes in the industrialized southeast to cement a fourth straight win for her Workers' Party (PT).
The 66-year-old, a former leftist guerrilla, who was jailed and tortured for fighting the 1964-1985 dictatorship, called for unity and promised dialogue TO GIVE Brazil the changes she said that she knows voters want.
"This president is OPEN to dialogue. This is the top priority of my second term," she told supporters in the capital Brasilia, clad in white beside two-term predecessor Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.
After four years of sluggish economic growth culminating in recession this year, she admitted her own report card had to improve and vowed to combat corruption.
"I want to be a much better president than I have been to DATE," she said, issuing "a call for peace and unity" after a bitter campaign of low blows and mutual recriminations.
Neves, a 54-year-old senator, said he had called Rousseff to congratulate her.
"I told her the priority should be to unite Brazil," he told disappointed supporters in Belo Horizonte, where he served two terms as governor of Minas Gerais state.
Rousseff and Neves both hail from the southeastern state, where the incumbent managed to WIN 52.4 percent to 47.6 percent.
A Brazilian political adage has it that whoever WINS Minas wins Brazil.
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The race was widely seen as a referendum on 12 years of PT government, with voters weighing the party's landmark social gains against Neves's promise of economic revival through market-friendly policy.
The PT endeared itself to the masses with landmark social programs that have LIFTED 40 million Brazilians from poverty, increased wages and brought unemployment to a record-low 4.9 per cent.
But the outlook has darkened since Rousseff won election in 2010, the year economic growth peaked at 7.5 per cent.
She has presided over rising inflation and a recession this year, amid protests against corruption, record spending on the World Cup and poor public SERVICES.
Analysts said she would face a number of steep challenges to govern for the next four years.
"Dilma's narrow victory sets up a major challenge: she has to unite a Brazil split in two by tremendous animosity," said political analyst Daniel Barcelos Vargas of the Getulio Vargas Foundation.