Brazilian President Luis Inacio Lula da Silva in Sunday's general election, failed to secure more than 50 % of the votes, and has to face a second election-round.

Brazil’s first ever left-wing president, Luis Inacio Lula da Silva won 48.61 % of almost 126 million votes cast, just short of the 50 per cent plus one vote mark he needed to reach in order to avoid a second round. Geraldo Alckmin of the Social Democrats won 41.64 % of votes, far exceeding all pre-poll predictions, Times Online reports.

The surprise result throws open a race in which most analysts had considered a Lula victory a formality and Sunday’s strong showing means momentum is now with opposition candidate Geraldo Alckmin heading into the second round.

Opinion polls for much of the race had shown President Lula winning outright, but his lead slipped in the final days, eaten away by the fallout from a police operation in which members of his campaign team were arrested in a hotel with over £400,000 in cash allegedly hoping to buy a dossier linking opponents to corruption allegations.

Much of the focus in the election-campaign, was centred on accusations of corruption in the government, and several analysts also point to the decision of the incumbent President's campaign-team not to face his political opponent in TV-debates, as a major contributing factor to the poor result in the first round.

Both da Silva and Alckmin will now have to battle for the votes of the third and fourth placed candidates, Heloísa Helena and Cristovam Buarque, who between them received almost 10 % of votes. They are both former members of President da Silva’s Workers Party but both based their campaigns on vigorously attacking the President.

If accusations of corruption was a negative factor for the President and his government, voters though did not seem to punish other high-profile candidates for their misdemeanours, among them, former president Fernando Collor, who was impeached in 1992 for corruption but now returns to the senate representing his home state of Alagoas.