If elected, Dilma Rouseff would become Brazil’s first female president, joining the ranks of recent world leaders who have challenged gender barriers, including Germany’s Angela Merkel, Argentina’s Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, and Costa Rica’s Laura Chinchilla.

Outgoing president Lula da Silva been barred by the Constitution to run for a third term, though he is allowed to run again in four years time. In eight years of his presidency he has made Brazil one of the world’s largest developing economies, able manage its way out of the global financial crisis.

President Lula has been widely praised for Brazil's rapid rise into an economic powerhouse, and many now question whether his chosen successor will be able to keep up the pace. Dr. Kees Koonings, a development studies professor at Utrecht University in The Netherlands, has no doubt that Dilma Rouseff will.

“If the international economic circumstances remain favorable for Brazil, she will most likely continue on the path of economic expansion and [continue] increasing Brazil’s significance,” Koonings said.

The largest economy in South America and the second largest economy in the western hemisphere, Brazil is expected to grow 7.5% this year. As member of the BRIC block of countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China), which are seen to symbolize the shift in global economic power, Brazil’s elections have gripped the world’s attention.

Brazil could be just the breath of fresh air that the developed countries of the West need. Boris Martynov from the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Latin American Institute thinks that emerging powers have what it takes to beat the challenges of the modern world.

“The international situation and the world… need some new blood, new ideas, new structures and new approaches to the foreign policy and to the international relations, because the quantity and the quality of the global problems push us to urgently find the ways and means to resolve those problems. I think that only the developed countries, only the West as such is no longer able to resolve those problems alone.”