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Fantasies about Brazilian politics


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By Claudio Campuzano
SPECIAL TO WORLD TRIBUNE.COM

July 25, 2002

For now and until October, when Brazil will choose a new president, its economy and its politics will be inseparably joined together by the prospect that a candidate well to the left might win. However, Brazil is not a country of confrontations but of compromises Ñ with its Portuguese roots, so different from the Spanish variety, developed in a placid tropical climate. So in the next few months we can expect many political adjustments and understandings that will have a bearing upon the economy, and vice versa.

But first some blunt advice. Forget about all the opinion polls you might have seen or heard that show leftist candidate Luiz Inacio da Silva, universally known as "Lula," well ahead in the contest for the presidency.

Firstly, most recent polls show Lula going down from the 40 percent he had reached Ñ he's at 35 percent Ñ and which, anyway, is not a majority but a plurality that can be expected to be rolled over in a second round of voting. In three previous elections Lula has never gone over the one-third maximum that Brazilian voters traditionally bestow on the hard ideological left.

Secondly, all the commentators that are wringing their hands as they predict the catastrophic future of a Cuban-style regime in Brazil Ñ such as Constantine Menges in a recent Weekly Standard Ñ appear to be ignorant of the fact that all the polls published reflect solely the voting intentions of Brazil's three largest urban centers, Rio de Janeiro, Brasilia and S‹o Paulo, which together account of only one quarter of the country's population and in which Lula's Workers Party has its electoral base. In other words, these polls do not in any way reflect the voting intentions of the three-quarters of the electorate that is less inclined to vote for a leftist.

And thirdly, the real political campaign has not begun yet. A lot can happen between now and election day on Oct. 3, especially because the electoral campaign will only take off on Aug. 20, when political parties begin to enjoy the free radio and television time Brazil's electoral law provides. It will be only then that Brazilians will be bombarded with 100 daily minutes of political advertising, half of it devoted to presidential candidates.

The renewal of the alliance between the two parties of the governing coalition, the centrist PMDB and the social-democrat PSDB, gives their candidate, Jose Serra Ñ now with 15 percent even in these flawed polls Ñ a chance to gain ground, because he will benefit from 40 percent of that free time, while Lula's Workers Party will get only 20 percent of it. Meanwhile, Ciro Gomes, a centrist with support from the right, has strengthened his position in second place, with 24 percent in the latest poll. It is a certainty that in a second round Serra's and Gomes's forces would join in voting against Lula.

Furthermore, in Brazil presidential candidates tend to benefit from the support of candidates to state and local offices, not the other way around. And the governing coalition can count on the most powerful political machine in the more populated states.

In recent nation-wide polls, even though almost half of all voters said they look for some change in a future government, three-quarters of them said they don't want to run the risk of losing the benefits of the eight years of president Fernando Henrique Cardoso's centrist administration which, by putting an end to chronic inflation and achieving macroeconomic stability, has made him the most popular president in Brazil's recent memory. With this in mind, Lula has been recently moderating his leftist discourse, but it is doubtful that Brazilians will go for a Marxist chameleon.

Nevertheless, nothing seems to daunt those who periodically forecast catastrophes for Brazil Ñ for example, late in 1998 and early in 1999 Ñ even though their alarming predictions never become reality. And ignorance of Latin America is no impediment for pontificating on it.

Hudson Institute's Menges offers these gems in support of his view of a Lula victory in Brazil: "Already Ch‡vez is probably contributing millions, if not tens of millions, of dollars covertly to da Silva out of the estimated $70 billion in oil revenues that Venezuela has obtained since he became president. It is virtually certain that Castro is committing hundreds, perhaps thousands, of his skilled political and intelligence operatives to help da Silva win, and thereby achieve one of Castro's highest strategic priorities."

Aside from the "probably" and the "virtually certain," fantasies in which Menges anchors his views, having long ago gone through all its oil revenues and then some, Ch‡vez's Venezuela is broke and he is barely holding on to the presidency. Indeed, just about the time Menges commentary appeared in the Weekly Standard, the Venezuelan congress was voting to charge Ch‡vez with embezzlement for having misused oil funds to plug holes in the budget. As to Castro's Spanish-speaking "skilled political and intelligence operatives," they would be hard-pressed to ply their dictatorial trade, the only one in which they are skilled, among the 180 million Portuguese-speaking and fiercely democratic Brazilians.

Claudio Campuzano (claudio-campuzano@hotmail.com) is U.S, correspondent for the Latin American newsweekly Tiempos del Mundo and editorial page editor of the New York daily Noticias del Mundo. He writes weekly for World Tribune.com

July 25, 2002



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