by John Fitzpatrick

The line-up for the presidential election is now complete and one can only feel sorry for the Brazilian elector who is obliged to vote by law since most of the candidates are unimpressive, to put it mildly. There are only two candidates with a real chance of winning – President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva of the PT and Geraldo Alckmin of the PSDB. Neither has anything new to offer so we face four more years of Lula, with his “charisma”, malapropisms with the Portuguese language and football analogies, or the dullness of Geraldo Alckmin, Brazil´s equivalent to the UK´s John Major. The best we can look forward to is another four years of gradual economic and social progress in the face of bureaucracy, corruption, violence and incompetence. The worst prospect would be if a re-elected Lula were to abandon the economic policies which have brought some progress and adopt more populist measures.

Although Brazil has been a functioning democracy for over 20 years, since the end of military rule, this election shows that the system still has a long way to go before it can match far more mature democracies. Voters are certainly being poorly served.

 

First of all, while the center and left are well represented there are no conservative  candidates with programs based on lower taxation and less government interference, as you would find in the US or western Europe. There are around 30 official registered political parties in Brazil yet only eight candidates are standing and five of these are from fringe parties. The largest party, the PMDB, is not even fielding a candidate. By deciding to stand back, the PMDB is free under electoral law to make local alliances with any other party it chooses. At the same time, it is basically disenfranchising its members and supporters who will have to vote for a president who is not a member of the PMDB. Neither is the Green Party fielding a candidate, a pity in a country which houses the world´s largest rain forest. 

 

Since no party can ever gain a majority in Congress, alliances are the norm. The presidential election is no different and the two main candidates have formed alliances with parties which should be their ideological foes – that is if ideology meant anything, which it does not in Brazilian politics. The need for a regional balance means southern-based candidates like Lula and Alckmin need a running mate from populous and politically important regions like the Northeast or Minas Gerais state.

 

Lula´s running mate will be his current vice president, Jose Alencar, who is a member of the PRB, a party formed just over a year ago following a split within his previous PL party. This “party” is one of several in Brazil which has links to Protestant evangelical groups which are highly organized and aggressive recruiters of new converts from the poorer classes who are disillusioned with the Roman Catholic church. These converts, even the poorest, usually pay a tithe to the evangelical churches. Some of these groups are extremely wealthy and run media and publishing groups. At the same time, Alencar is a millionaire industrialist from Minas Gerais who owns a big textiles business. One would expect someone like Lula, with his background as a trade union leader who opposed the military, to be against this kind of party but this is not the case. Although Lula has spent most of his life in the São Paulo area, he was born in the Northeast and is still regarded as a “nordestino” by the people from that region.

 

Alckmin is a social democrat yet his running mate, Jose Jorge, comes from the PFL party. The PFL is supposed to be the most conservative party in economic terms but it has no policies worth talking about. Like the PMDB, it represents the interests of factions and personalities and contains a number of unsavory characters. The PSDB and PFL have been political bedmates for over 10 years despite the ideological differences which should exist between them. Fernando Henrique Cardoso, who was president from 1995 until 2002, had a member of the PFL, Marco Maciel, as his vice-president. Jorge comes from the Northeastern state of Pernambuco, as did Maciel.

 

Of the other six candidates, only two are worth mentioning – Senators Heloisa Helena and Cristovam Buarque. Both are ex-members of the PT who are now standing for other parties. Helena was one of a group of PT members expelled from the party for voting against government policies in Congress. They later formed a new party called PSOL. She represents the old-style left and advocates policies which are idealistic and impractical and have failed wherever they have been tried. Having said that, she has gained great publicity over the last year as a fierce critic of the PT. She was a vocal member of a congressional committee investigating the “bribes for votes” scandal which destroyed the PT´s image as an ethical party. Even Helena´s political critics in the media give her credit for at least standing up for what she believes in.

 

Style over Substance – How Lula Governs Brazil
Buarque is a more interesting character. He is standing for the PDT, a party which he joined only about a year ago after leaving the PT. Buarque had been Lula´s education minister and was fired publicly in a rather crude way in 2004 during a visit to Portugal. Lula said at the time that he wanted a more “political” and less “academic” minister. This emphasis on style rather than substance sums up Lula´s approach to running Brazil. Buarque did have a political background and was governor of the Federal District. However, politicians like Buarque and Helena, who would be highly regarded in other countries, are simply not suited to the rough and tumble of Brazilian politics where grabbing power and holding on to it at almost any cost is the style.

 

Lula is the odds-on favorite to win at the moment. Opinion polls show that Alckmin is narrowing the enormous gap between them but, unless something disastrous happens to throw Lula off course, it is hard to see Alckmin defeating him. While Lula can point to a number of improvements, such as a big increase in the minimum wage, falling unemployment and interest rates, and inflation held firmly under control, Alckmin has nothing new to offer. Since Lula has basically followed the economic policies of Cardoso, although he would deny it, Alckmin cannot seriously challenge them. He has also failed to capitalize on the “votes for bribes” affair. This episode showed that the PT was as corrupt and devious as any of the other parties which have been milking Brazil throughout its history yet the PSDB never took advantage of it. In fact, the PSDB may end up ruing the day it chose Alckmin as its candidate rather than his better known and tougher rival, Jose Serra, the former mayor of São Paulo.

© John Fitzpatrick 2006