Oct. 31 (Bloomberg) -- Jose Serra, who lost Brazil's 2002 presidential election to Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, won the runoff vote for mayor of Sao Paulo, South America's largest city, exit polls showed.

Serra won 55 percent of the vote, compared to 45 percent for incumbent Mayor Marta Suplicy, a member of Lula's Workers' Party, according to an exit poll carried out by Ibope and released by TV Globo.

In Porto Alegre, where Lula's party has governed the past 16 years, the race between opposition candidate Jose Fogaca and Raul Pont, the ruling party's candidate, was too close to call, the Ibope poll showed. Fogaca had 51 percent of the vote and Pont 49 percent, with a margin of error in the poll of 2 percentage points.

In Curitiba, the capital city of the state of Parana, Beto Richa, of Serra's Social Democracy Party, won 55 percent of the vote to 45 percent for Workers' Party candidate Angelo Vanhoni, with 97 percent of votes counted, according to the Supreme Electoral Court.

For the Sao Paulo exit poll, Ibope interviewed 6,000 voters. The margin of error for the poll is 1.7 percentage points.

To contact the reporter on this story: Guillermo Parra-Bernal in Sao Paulo at at gparra@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: October 31, 2004 16:30 EST