MOSCOW, August 17 (RIA Novosti) – The Brazilian Socialist Party has nominated former Environment Minister Marina Silva as its new candidate for the upcoming presidential elections in place of the party leader Eduardo Campos killed in a plane crash last week, AP reported Sunday.
"The party has some internal procedure it wants to follow to announce it, but the main leadership has confirmed it," said Ricardo Young, a Sao Paulo city councilman and a close associate of Silva, as quoted by AP.
Silva accepted the party's proposal for her to run for presidency during Friday's meeting of the party leaders.
Campos ranked third in popularity among the candidates for the October 5 vote, after the current president, Dilma Rousseff, of the Workers' Party, and Aecio Neves, of the Brazilian Social Democracy Party.
Eduardo Campos died in a plane crash Wednesday on his way to the southern city of Santos.
The 56-year-old environmentalist Silva joined Campos' party in 2013 after she failed to collect enough signatures to create her own party. Silva ran for presidency in 2010 as a Green Party candidate, and ended up with 20 percent of the vote, giving way to the winner Rousseff and a Brazilian Social Democracy Party (PSDB) candidate Jose Serra.
