On October 6, Brazilians will vote in the first round of an election to determine the successor to President Fernando Henrique Cardoso. If, as expected, no candidate wins a firm majority, the second, definitive round will be held three weeks later. Already the international financial markets and that country's powerful business and media establishments are nervous-with good reason. Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, candidate of the leftist Workers' Party (PT), on his fourth run for the presidency, is leading in the polls.
As pointed out in previous editions of this Outlook, Lula is every radical sociology graduate student's most garish fantasy come to life. A fifty-six-year-old former metallurgical worker and trade union leader, he speaks in the plain language of the factory floor, though his terms of reference are obviously borrowed from Marxist tracts. Of late he has refurbished his speeches with antiglobalization rhetoric, and in fact is a major personality in the World Social Forum, one of the principal bodies that have lately rendered rather problematic the regular meetings of the G7 countries and the international financial institutions. As one observer who had occasion to hear Lula speak in Washington several years ago remarked to a former U.S. ambassador to Brazil, "The really frightening thing about this guy is that he really believes what he says."
To be sure, the October elections are still a long way off, and Lula has always tended to lead in the polls at this stage of the game. Nonetheless, there are reasons to think that this time he just might win.
In the first place, Brazil's parties are weak and tend to represent outstanding personalities rather than broad, articulated social forces. This has meant that since the country returned to democracy in 1985 after twenty years of military rule, its elected governments have often been unwieldy coalitions. Cardoso is a case in point: Formally affiliated with the Brazilian Social Democratic Party (PSDB), which is theoretically center-left, many of his ministers and functionaries have been drawn from two other parties that supported him in 1994 and 1998--the Liberal Front (PFL), which most people consider center-right, and the Brazilian Democratic Movement (PMDB), which in any country would be decisively right of center. Cardoso's political success--uniting a remarkably broad spectrum of the electorate--was largely due to two factors: his record as finance minister during the presidency of José Sarney, during which he brought a rapid end to hyperinflation, and the fact that he was the "not-Lula" candidate.
This time around, however, it appears that the constituent parties that have supported Cardoso's two administrations may not be willing to bury their differences. The president's choice of a successor--Health Minister José Serra--has failed to ignite great enthusiasm, either among the voters or among the parties of the ruling coalition. Moreover, some of the tactics used to advance Serra's candidacy may prove to have been counterproductive.
For instance, in the early months of this year the presumptive candidate of the PFL, Roseanna Sarney, popular governor of the state of Maranhão and daughter of the former president, was running even with Lula in many surveys, and in some was even showing signs of being able to defeat him. After a scandal that Senhora Sarney insists was "staged" by Cardoso's people--the raid on the office of a company owned by her husband, which turned up $600,000 for which no obvious accounting could be made--her standing in the polls dropped dramatically, leading to her withdrawal just before the April 6 filing deadline.
In retaliation four ministers of the PFL and more than 2,000 political appointees in the administration resigned in protest. It thus remains unclear whether the party will end up endorsing Serra, running another candidate of its own, or releasing its voters to make their own choices. In any case, it was a defection that Cardoso and Serra could ill afford.
At the same time, Serra has been disappointed at the refusal of Jarbas Vasconcelos, governor of the state of Pernambuco, to join him as his vice-presidential candidate. Regional considerations are important here, because Serra, a senator from São Paulo state[1], badly needs a running mate from the impoverished northeastern region of Brazil, which accounts for more than a quarter of the vote.
To be sure, if the parties that supported Cardoso come together, Lula cannot win the presidency of Brazil. If they fail to do so, however, it is doubtful he can be stopped. In many ways the situation resembles that of the elections in Chile in 1970. There, too, a Marxist-in this case the late, undeservedly martyred Salvador Allende--benefited from a decision of the right and center to run individual candidates rather than to unify their forces, as they had done six years before. To be sure, unlike Brazil, Chile had no provision at the time for a second round; thus Allende was able to stumble into office with less than 37 percent of the vote.
But even a second round may not save the day in Brazil. The latest polls show Lula with approximately 31 percent of the vote, but in theoretical match-ups in a second round with Serra, Sarney, or even another left-of-center candidate, Rio de Janeiro governor Anthony Garotinho, he still comes perilously close to victory (46 percent versus 41 percent against Serra, 49 percent versus 35 percent against Sarney, and 46 percent versus 40 percent against Garotinho).
To repeat, election day in Brazil is still a long way away, and Brazilians, unlike many of their South American neighbors, tend to be sensible and pragmatic when faced with drastic political alternatives. Brazil is not a country with a suicidal vocation. Nonetheless, this time it appears to be skating perilously close to the edge.
The Alternatives
There is a whole school of thinking these days that argues that Lula has changed, that he has become more pragmatic, that if elected he will probably turn out to be no more radical than President Cardoso, who after all has a leftist past of his own. The evidence for this hypothesis is drawn less from anything the candidate himself has said or done than from the record of performance by some members of his party. PT politicians have been elected in recent years to responsible positions throughout Brazil, most notably in the important city of Porto Alegre or the state of Rio Grande do Sul. In most places they have functioned as normal (or perhaps even better than normal) public officials.
On the other hand, Lula is a different affair altogether. He angrily rejects the notion that once elected he will somehow moderate his views. His campaign slogan is "Another Brazil is Possible," and he frequently rails against the Brazilian media and judiciary, as well as (in a veiled but unmistakable fashion) against the United States. His denunciations of the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) are surely gratuitous; Brazil is unlikely to ever join such an association, even under a right-wing government. But everyone understands that to speak against the FTAA (and for that matter, against globalization) is a polite way of denouncing "American imperialism." Moreover, Lula's frequent trips to Cuba and his fulsome admiration for communism as practiced there should disabuse optimists as to where the candidate's real sympathies lie.
To be sure, Brazil is a very big and very complex country with highly articulated interest groups and regions. Ramming it into a Marxist template will be no easy task, although the severity of the challenge may not prevent President Lula from trying. Even if the effort fell considerably short of producing a continental-size Cuba, at a minimum it could easily undermine the basic stability of South America's largest country. One has only to cast a glance at the Grand Guignol currently underway in Venezuela to recognize that possibility.
As Lula's poll numbers rise, Serra has taken to emphasizing his own fundamental conservatism. In a recent interview he spoke out forcefully against land seizures by the radical MST peasant movement, which, he claimed, was less a social phenomenon than a political force with agendas of its own. (He added gratuitously that Brazil's agrarian sector is one of the most heavily subsidized of any part of the country's economy.)
Serra also addressed the question of security, a growing concern in a country where the number of kidnappings and other serious crimes has risen dramatically in recent years. In the past anti-Lula forces have benefited from the PT's stated view that crime is a social phenomenon traceable wholly to economic deprivation. While that notion is popular with well-to-do liberals, academics, and foreign journalists, it is strongly rejected by Brazil's poor, who suffer most from the lack of law enforcement and adequate policing. To be sure, simply allocating more money to law enforcement, or even creating (as Serra proposes) a ministry of security, may not be enough. This much was revealed several years ago when Cardoso's appointee to head the Federal Police--the Brazilian equivalent of our Federal Bureau of Investigation--was held up for months in the congress while the parties of the governing coalition engaged in lengthy horse-trading over votes. In the end the government's candidate had to be rejected anyway, since it was revealed that during the military government he had tortured a Catholic priest to obtain a confession.
Lost Opportunities
Serra might well be more advantageously situated at this point had the Cardoso administration not wasted so much of its second term. For the truth is that very little in the way of serious reform of Brazil's tax and pension systems has been accomplished these past four years, largely because of resistance by the state governors and members of congress, as well as by vested interests in the corporate and political communities generally.
Paradoxically, Cardoso's rather lackluster approach to economic reform has turned out to be of considerable use to Lula. Since the government claims to be committed to drastic, market-oriented economic reform, it can be castigated for failing to produce results. Or rather, Lula can pretend that the lack of progress in eliminating poverty and shrinking the gaping social difference between Brazilians is the fault of policies that, in fact, have scarcely been applied at all.
In many ways the situation in Brazil bears chilling resemblance to that in Argentina. In both countries critics of the government claim that "neoliberalism" is the root cause of all social and economic ills, though in truth it has hardly been practiced, and only in very minimal doses at that. At the same time, provincial governments in both have been able to hold the federal authorities at ransom for resources. Meanwhile, Brazil's economy has been performing at levels far below its real potential. What it needs are growth rates resembling those of Chile in the late 1980s or early 1990s--roughly 7 percent a year. Instead, the Brazilian economy grew at only 1.6 percent in 2001, and this year and next it is expected to do only slightly better (roughly 2.5 and 3.5 percent, respectively). Slow growth or low growth is particularly perilous in a country like Brazil, where budget deficits have been skyrocketing out of control. If the combination continues, Brazil may end up facing some of the same problems as its southern neighbor.
What this means is that whoever is elected president in October will be facing both rising public expectations and increasingly fewer resources to meet them. And whoever he is, he will be less powerful, less influential, and less well-connected internationally than Cardoso.
Any consideration of Brazil also brings Italy to mind--like Italy, Brazil is an economic heavyweight (the world's tenth largest economy)--which thus far has managed to survive in spite of widespread corruption, general disorganization, outdated and excessively rigid labor laws, a conflictive relationship between regions, and a political class far too clever for its own (and its country's) good. It would be rash to assume that the mere election of a radical like Lula will be the end of Brazil. But many people--not a few of them Brazilians--would prefer not to put that notion to the test.
Note
1. In Brazil senators can serve concurrently as ministers in the executive branch.
Mark Falcoff is a resident scholar at AEI.
