BRAZIL’S NEW FEMALE president says she will make it her priority to fight poverty – and to promote gender equality.

Dilma Rousseff, 62, won yesterday’s presidential election with 56 per cent of the vote to 44 per cent against rival Jose Serra. During her first speech as president-elect, Ms Rousseff said:

I would like very much today for fathers and mothers of daughters to look in their eyes and tell them: ‘Yes, a woman can’.

An economist who was jailed for three years from 1970 as a Marxist rebel, Rousseff has never held elected office in Brazil but has worked in local and state government posts. She was chief of staff for the present presidential incumbent, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.

Rousseff has been branded “the world’s most powerful woman” because she will be running a country whose growth rate – inspired by its new oil wealth – is rivalled only by China and who is presiding over a population of 200 million people. The London Independent has said that as head of state, she outranks Hillary Clinton, the US Secretary of State, and Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor.

Rousseff’s campaign to be president was endorsed by Puerto Rican actor Benicio del Toro, fim director Oliver Stone and several other international figures.

Here was Stone’s tribute to Rousseff’s “determination and energy”: