Brazil Political and Business Comment - The Thief of Baghdad and the Pied Piper of Brazil

One wonders if Brazil´s presidential candidates, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, (PT) or Jose Serra (PSDB) have any contacts with the Iraqi President Saddam Hussein´s campaign advisers because if they do I suggest they contract them immediately for the last days of the election campaign. The cost would be worth it. In the last Iraqi election these campaigners helped Hussein gain 99.96% of the vote, not a bad result by any means. However, this time round they surpassed themselves and helped Hussein pulled off a pretty effective result by gaining 100% of the votes.

Lula has also gained new admirers, as expected, from the candidates who failed in the first round. Ciro Gomes (PPS), who spent his campaign complaining about Lula´s lack of experience, even turned up in one of Lula´s TV propaganda spots exhorting his supporters to vote for the man whom a week earlier he had thought unfit to run a country as great as Brazil. The other loser in the first round, Anthony Garotinho (PSB) also urged his supporters to vote for the PT candidate. Garotinho´s wife won the governorship of Rio de Janeiro state against the PT candidate in the first round but this has not stopped him from siding with Lula.

Other Lula supporters include ex-governor of Maranhão state, Roseana Sarney (PFL), who could herself have been a candidate had she not become enmeshed in a financial scandal. Her father Jose Sarney (PMDB), a former President, like Itamar Franco, is also backing Lula, as is Senator Antonio Carlos Magalhães from Bahia. Magalhães resigned from the Senate in disgrace after breaking procedural rules while he was chairman. They will not be surprised that Bahia voters have returned him. Other strange supporters from the old-style political bosses the PT has always opposed are former São Paulo mayor Paulo Maluf (PPB) and former São Paulo governor Orestes Quercia (PMDB) who both flopped in their bids to become governor of São Paulo state. Leonel Brizola (PDT), a former governor of Rio state, also gave Lula his backing. With the exception of Franco and Brizola, who are both just grumpy old men, all the others have question marks over their ethical behaviour and how they achieved their personal wealth.

The Browning Version
Looking at the range of Lula´s backers one cannot help recalling Robert Browning´s wonderful poem on the Pied Piper of Hamelin. Here is the poet´s description of how the rats, which had been plaguing the city, appeared when the Pied Piper played:

“And ere three shrill notes the pipe uttered,
You heard as if an army muttered;
And the muttering grew to a grumbling;
And the grumbling grew to a mighty rumbling;
And out of the houses the rats came tumbling.
Great rats, small rats, lean rats, brawny rats,
Brown rats, black rats, grey rats, tawny rats,
Grave old plodders, gay young friskers,
Fathers, mothers, uncles, cousins,
Cocking tails and pricking whiskers,
Families by tens and dozens,
Brothers, sisters, husbands, wives --
Followed the Piper for their lives.
From street to street he piped advancing,
And step for step they followed dancing,
Until they came to the river Weser
Wherein all plunged and perished! “

Unlike the Pied Piper though Lula will not be doing the citizens of Brazil a favour by seeing the rats get their just deserts but may well encourage a new plague.