Post-election garbage outside a voting station in a populous neighbourhood of Rio de Janeiro, a day after the first round of Brazil’s presidential elections – a metaphor for the dirty campaign. Credit: Tânia Rêgo/Agência Brasil

By Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, Oct 7 2014 (IPS)

The dream of electing Brazil’s first black president, an environmental activist from the Amazon jungle, lasted only 40 days and was frustrated in Sunday’s elections. In the end, it is the two parties that have dominated Brazilian politics for the last 20 years that will face off in the second round of voting on Oct. 26.

Former environment minister Marina Silva, who was briefly the frontrunner in the polls after she was named presidential candidate by the Brazilian Socialist Party (PSB) on Aug. 16, saw her popularity plunge in the last three weeks. She came in third, with 21 percent of the vote.

Aecio Neves of the Brazilian Social Democracy Party (PSDB), which governed Brazil from 1995 to 2003 under former president Fernando Henrique Cardoso, and President Dilma Rousseff of the Workers’ Party (PT), garnered 33.5 and 41.6 percent of the vote, respectively.

Improvisation, a result of her sudden designation as candidate and the diverse coalition that backed her up, headed by the party that thrust her into the race, may have contributed to her failure and makes the political future of the black former Amazon activist unclear.

If projections are borne out, the economy will be the central focus of the new campaign, which will be the sixth time since 1994 that the PSDB and the PT, both of which have a social democratic orientation, face off at the polls.Improvisation, a result of her sudden designation as candidate and the diverse coalition that backed her up, headed by the party that thrust her into the race, may have contributed to her failure and makes the political future of the black former Amazon activist unclear.

But in elections characterised by sudden shifts, such as Silva’s rise and fall, a new surprise could come from a scandal at Brazil’s state-run oil giant Petrobras, involving billions of dollars in kickbacks over the last decade.

During part of that period, Rousseff chaired the Petrobras board.

The investigation is in the hands of the police and the legal authorities. But the names of some politicians and companies implicated in the scandal have been leaked to the press.

The fear, especially in the government, is that other information will come to light.

The opposition criticises the current administration for what it calls errors in the management of the economy, which it says have led to the current stagnation, high inflation, fiscal deterioration and imbalances in the external accounts.

But Rousseff, for her part, can point to the low unemployment rate – just five percent in August – the result of the generation of millions of jobs during the nearly 12 years of PT government, as well as the progress made in income distribution and poverty reduction.

The results of the Oct. 5 elections also reflect a geographically and socially polarised country. In the industrialised south and the state of São Paulo in particular, the strong desire to unseat the PT gave rise to a “useful vote” cast by many who, as they saw Silva’s popularity decline, threw their support behind Neves. In the state of São Paulo, Neves took 44 percent of the vote, compared to Rousseff’s 22 percent.

The PT’s strongest backing is in the impoverished Northeast, which has only slightly more voters than São Paulo. The president took nearly 60 percent of the vote in the Northeast, Brazil’s poorest region.

The country thus remains ideologically divided, since the first victory by former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (2003-2011).

The two rivals are now both hoping to win the support of Silva and the coalition that backed her, headed by the socialists, which could be decisive in the runoff.

The difference between the moderate left-wing Rousseff and the business-friendly centrist Neves in the first round was 8.37 million votes, while Silva took 22.17 million votes.

What is still unclear is the direction that will be taken by the heterogeneous coalition headed by the PSB. In 2010, when the environmentalist ran for president as the Green Party (PV) candidate, she won 19.3 percent of the vote and remained neutral during the campaign for the runoff between candidates of the same two parties as today.

But the situation was very different back then. Silva presented herself as a third alternative, criticising the polarisation between the PT and the PSDB, and setting forth her own proposals.

Dissatisfied with the PV, she abandoned the Greens to create the Sustainability Network, aimed at promoting socioenvironmental sustainability and a new way of doing politics.

But her group did not achieve the necessary 492,000 signatures to become a political party because the electoral court failed to validate 95,000 signatures. Silva then decided to join the PSB, which named her vice presidential candidate on the ticket led by socialist leader Eduardo Campos.

However, Campos died in a plane crash on Aug. 13 and Silva replaced him as presidential candidate. Seen as the leader who best represented the widespread discontent that fuelled the June 2013 nationwide protests, her popularity soared, until she was ahead of Rousseff in the opinion polls.

But the future of Silva, who took only two percentage points more of the vote than in the 2010 elections, is now cloudy. Her political and personal weaknesses were revealed by the harassment from her opponents, especially the Rousseff campaign, which mounted aggressive ad attacks against the other woman in the race.

For example, the PT charged that Silva would eliminate the Bolsa Familia programme, which provides cash transfers to nearly 14 million poor households, would reduce investments in pre-salt oil fields exploration, and would hand power over to the bankers.

Under Brazil’s election laws, Silva’s team had just two minutes of electoral programming on nightly television – hardy enough time to defend herself from the allegations, let alone set forth her environmental proposals, which brought her international renown, or other attractive points on her platform, such as a “renewal of democracy”.

Because free electoral programming time in Brazil is proportionate to the parliamentary representation of each coalition, Rousseff had 11 minutes a day of broadcasting time.

For the second round, the time allotted is the same for both candidates: 10 minutes each.

But the ambiguous policy proposals and reversals that marked Silva’s campaign also hurt her image. She started out by reversing her stance just after the socialist party officially announced its support for same-sex marriage and other rights for homosexuals. She later fell into other contradictions regarding her record in the Senate.

Nor did Silva perform well in the televised debates.

It is not yet known whether she will stay with the PSB, which was left without a strong leader to hold it together, or will go it alone with her Sustainability Network. The socialists seem to be coming apart: Some of the PSB’s leaders have already come out in favour of Neves, while others have ties to the governing PT.

On the economic front, Silva’s advisers are close to their counterparts in the PSDB, which would push her towards supporting that party’s candidate in the second round. To that is added the accusations by the PT, which include the label “neoliberal” because of Silva’s economic orientation.

Backing either of the two candidates still in the race would hurt her central stance, which is to lead a third route to overcome the polarisation between the PT and the PSDB while renovating and cleaning up Brazilian politics.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

Eduardo Campos and Marina Silva, the Brazilian Socialist Party’s ticket for the October presidential elections, before Campos died in a plane crash. Credit: Agência Brasil/EBC

By Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, Aug 16 2014 (IPS)

The death of socialist presidential candidate Eduardo Campos opens up an unexpected opportunity for environmental leader Marina Silva to return with renewed strength to the struggle to govern Brazil, offering a “third way” in a highly polarised campaign.

Silva, who was environment minister from 2003 to 2008, won 19.6 million votes in the 2010 presidential elections – 19.3 percent of the total – and is seen by many as someone who can breathe new life into the Brazilian political scene.

The winding road, littered with tragedy, that led to her nomination as vice presidential candidate on Campos’ ticket could thrust her back to the forefront, with a stronger chance of winning.

She has preserved a large part of the popular support she gained in 2010. In addition, opinion polls show that she was the political leader who benefited the most from the mass protests that shook Brazil’s big cities in June and July 2013, which rejected the political class as a whole.

The national commotion caused by the death of Campos in a plane crash on Aug. 13 could also give a fresh impulse to a candidacy aimed at breaking with the two-party system.

The frontrunners in the polls for the Oct. 5 elections are President Dilma Rousseff of the Workers’ Party (PT) and Aecio Neves of the Brazilian Social Democracy Party (PSDB). The PT has governed Brazil since 2003, and the PSDB did so from 1995 to 2002.

Marina Silva’s political career began in the small northwestern Amazon jungle state of Acre, where she was born in 1958. She didn’t learn to read and write until the age of 16, after she left the rainforest to seek healthcare, as she was suffering from hepatitis, malaria and leishmaniosis.

Her close work with rubber-tapper and activist Chico Mendes, who organised his fellow workers in Acre to fight for their rights and became a martyr for the Amazon when he was killed in 1988, was the driver of her first electoral triumphs.

A senator since 1994, Silva was one of the main leaders of the PT, which first came to power with President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva (2003-2011).

She was environment minister until she resigned in 2008 over policy disagreements with Lula, who she criticised for pursuing “material growth at any cost,” at the expense of the poor and the environment.

A year later she left the PT and joined the small Green Party (PV) to run in the 2010 presidential elections, which were won by Rousseff, Lula’s former energy minister and chief of staff. Silva came in third, but with an unexpectedly strong showing.

She then left the PV as well, over disagreements with its reform proposals, and tried to create a new political grouping, the Sustainability Network. But the electoral court ruled that it had insufficient signatures to qualify.

To avoid being left out of the race, Silva joined the Brazilian Socialist Party (PSB), led by Campos, and became his vice-presidential running-mate.

After Campos’ death, she would seem to be his natural replacement. The PSB has until Aug. 23 to name its new candidate.

If the PSB does not choose Silva, it would be contributing to the two-party system that has reigned for 20 years, and would lose standing in the other levels of power, such as state legislatures and governments. A socialist legislator acknowledged that Campos is “irreplaceable.”

The dilemma for the PSB is that accepting Silva as its candidate would be another kind of suicide, because of the loss of identity it would entail for the party. The environmentalist has numerous discrepancies with the party’s policies.

The PSB, which named the ministers of science and technology during Lula’s two terms, is in favour of nuclear energy and transgenic crops, which are rejected by Silva and other environmentalists.

Campos was one of those ministers in 2004-2005, and his popularity grew when he served as governor of the state of Pernambuco from 2006 to early 2014, thanks to the swift economic growth and industrial development he led in his state, which is in the Northeast, Brazil’s poorest region.

Megaprojects like the Suape Port industrial complex, the diversion of the São Francisco River to bring water to the semiarid Northeast, and the Transnordestina railway were decisive for Pernambuco to have the highest economic growth of any Brazilian state in the last few years.

But environmentalists are opposed to many aspects of these megaprojects, which form part of a development-oriented policy focus that runs counter in many ways to the sustainability touted by Silva’s Network.

The projects were launched or given a new impulse in the last decade by Lula, for whom Campos was an important and loyal ally. His PSB only broke with Rousseff’s PT government last year.

Campos, with popularity ratings of more than 70 percent in Pernambuco, presented himself as an alternative to the PSDB social democrats and the PT labourists. But his criticism was not aimed at the Lula administration; it was strictly reserved for the government of Rousseff.

That distinction could have been based on electoral calculations, because Lula remains extremely popular. But it could have also been due to affinity with the former president. Campos was the political heir to Miguel Arraes, his grandfather, a legendary leader of the Brazilian left who governed Pernambuco for three terms. But he was also a disciple of Lula.

Like Lula, he was a master of dialogue, of building alliances even among disparate groups, forging relations with both business leaders and poor communities, and responding to the forces of the market while introducing strong social policies.

Rousseff, on the other hand, lost support among the business community due to her economic policies.

Campos had to redouble his efforts to win over landowners and ranchers, because of the rejection by those sectors of his running-mate, whose environmentalism is seen as an obstacle to the expansion of agribusiness.

Despite their contradictions, the union of Campos and Silva strengthened the so-called “third way” in Brazil’s elections.

Campos’ death could actually give Silva a boost in the elections, since she is already starting out with a broader electoral base, and will benefit from the fact that many Brazilians are fed up with the way politics is done in this country.

In July, according to the latest poll by the Data Folha Institute, 36 percent of respondents said they would vote for Rousseff, 20 percent for the PSDB’s Neves, and eight percent for Campos.

But analysts are now pointing to two weak points for Silva. One is that she alienates productive sectors with her ecological discourse, and as a consequence loses campaign donations. Another is her membership of the Pentecostal Assemblies of God, which draws her support from the growing evangelical flock but distances the Catholic majority.

In any case, analysts don’t rule out the possibility of a second round between two women who were both former ministers of Lula. But the question is to what extent the PSB’s leaders are prepared to renounce their ideals.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes