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New Brazilian President

Nov 01, 2010 Editorial

It would appear that our giant neighbour to the south, Brazil, has just elected a new President from the incumbent Lula’s Partido dos Trabalhadores – PT. Dilma Rousseff, the former Marxist guerrilla and career bureaucrat who was handpicked by President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, her political mentor.
She appeared to have emerged victorious in yesterday’s runoff elections. She will be Brazil’s first female President.
In the first round of the presidential election on October 3, Rousseff got 46.9 percent of the votes, falling just short of the majority she needed to avoid a runoff ballot. Jose Serra finished second with 32.6 percent.
This was a bit of a surprise, considering the huge 80 per cent popularity of President Lula who had campaigned ubiquitously on her behalf against the centrist Serra. It is probably more of a reflection on the fact that the 62-year-old technocrat, somewhat lacking in charisma and abrasively authoritarian in manner (though currently undergoing a major makeover), had never before contested an election.
Moreover, in April 2009 she was diagnosed with lymphatic cancer – a condition of which she has since been pronounced “cured”.
The “spoiler” was the Green Party’s Marina Silva, a former environment minister and no relation to the president, who took 20 million votes in the first round, leaving Rousseff and Serra to scramble for her supporters during the second round.
It is not that Dilma, as she is popularly known, is completely new to politics – it is just that she has not been in the spotlight until Lula picked her as his successor in February of this year. Apart from being an urban guerrilla during the military dictatorship, she was for twenty years an active member of the populist Partido Democratico Trabalhista [Democratic Labour Party / PDT] and joined the PT only in 2000.
She did, however, serve in the PT-led state government of Rio Grande do Sul as secretary of energy; in the first Lula administration as minister of mines and energy; and in the second as head of the Casa Civil (i.e. the president’s chief-of-staff).
More than one commentator has compared Lula’s imposition of Dilma – whom the PT, with some reluctance and some dissent, finally accepted as its candidate – to the famous dedazo of Mexican presidents during the decades of PRI domination in that country.
Lula was ineligible to run and for the first time was not the candidate of PT since the fall of the dictatorship. Many feel that Dilma might just be keeping the presidential seat warm for Lula in the next elections of 2014.
From this perspective, being forced into a second round may not have been a huge setback and it may actually be an opportunity for Dilma in disguise. Brazilians like to vote and second round runoffs are common and the extra time gave her the opportunity to become more familiar to the electorate.
She took on Serra more directly, arguing more specifically about the merits of her proposals, and being more energetic in countering the multiple insinuations of corruption that have weakened her national support in recent months.
All of this will be, in the long run, good for the candidate, and good for Brazilian democracy. It should also be good preparation for the realities of politics as President of Brazil.
In the first round, most voters demonstrated they were more than happy with the policies of President Lula and even Serra had to try to find common ground.
At the final campaign stop in her hometown of Belo Horizonte, Rousseff said, without any sign of irony, “President Lula, obviously, won’t be a presence within my Cabinet. But I will always talk with the president and I will have a very close and strong relationship with him. Nobody in this country will separate me from President Lula.”
For Guyana, we only hope that Dilma proceeds apace with Lula’s plan to facilitate Brazil’s entry to the Atlantic via a surfaced Linden-Lethem Highway.

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