Brazil & Southern Cone - October 2010 (ISSN 1741-4431)

The third placed presidential candidate, Marina Silva of the Partido Verde (PV), caused a major upset in the first round of the Brazilian election on 3 October, taking an unexpectedly strong 19.3% of the vote and forcing the election to a run-off between the first placed Dilma Rousseff of the ruling left-wing Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT) and the runner up José Serra of the main centre-left opposition Partido da Social Democracia Brasileira (PSDB), on 31 October. Silva, President Lula   da Silva's estranged former environment minister and PT defector, has been crowned Brazil's new kingmaker. The second round kicks off on Friday, 8 October.

The result was a defeat for President Lula, who has personally championed Rousseff over the past 18 months, having imposed her candidacy on a doubtful PT. Rousseff took 46.9% of the valid vote (or 47.6m votes, of a 135.8m electorate), a few points shy of her much trumpeted first round victory (which required 50% plus one of the valid vote). Notably however, the ruling 10-11 party coalition, led by the PT and Brazil's largest party, the Partido do Movimento Democrático Brasileiro (PMDB), won the general election overall, securing strong majorities in both houses of the federal parliament and at the state level. That seems to suggest that some of the electorate may still harbour some doubts about Rousseff herself, despite her status as Lula's anointed heir. A corruption scandal centred on Rousseff's former office, the ministry of the presidency, did her no favours.

Together, Marina Silva and José Serra won 52%. Serra, who took 32.6% (33.1m votes),   a bit better than pollsters forecast, has Silva to thank for rescuing his political career. Silva's rise in September matched Rousseff's last minute decline point for point. Yet almost everyone was at a loss, immediately, to explain her 20% support (see sidebar).

Immediately after the vote the PSDB leadership made strong overtures to Silva. Serra's campaign team is being shaken up, with his former party presidential rival Aécio Neves, now senator-elect for the country's second largest electoral college, Minas Gerais, along with the PSDB party president Sérgio Guerra and the former president Fernando Henrique Cardoso (1995-2002) rumoured to be mounting an 'intervention' to seize Serra's campaign from the hands of “marketing people", and reconnect the somewhat isolated Serra with the rest of the party (and its frustrated allies, one of which, the Partido Trabalhista do Brasil, walked away from the PSDB alliance just days before polling). Ahead of the vote, when it was evident that Silva might just pose a threat to Rousseff, Cardoso said he would “do everything" to promote a second round alliance between Silva and Serra. Cardoso will now counsel Serra, who ran a limp campaign, to strongly attack Rousseff, who Cardoso accuses of being a mere puppet of Lula's and not “a real politician".

Lula, who himself contested two run-offs (in 2002 and 2006), declared after the shock result that he had always been ready for a second round. He will now take personal charge of Rousseff's campaign. At stake are Silva's 19.6m votes. Brazil's chastened pollsters, who completely underestimated Silva's support right up to the eve of the vote, when they were still giving Rousseff 51% of the valid vote, suggest that Rousseff would be able to take 30% of PV supporters, against 50% for Serra, just enough to see her through on 31 October. The first round victor in Brazil almost invariably wins the run off and Rousseff is technically in a better position than Lula was in 2006. But only brave pollsters would now dare call the second round, in the wake of their disastrous predictions.  

Silva   - the most wanted
On 4 October, Marina Silva announced that the PV would take two weeks to decide which presidential candidate to support in the second round. Silva is playing it very cool. “We are going to go through a process_I am not taking up a position a priori, I will be consistent with my convictions", she insisted. One option would be   to adopt a neutral stance. Silva said that the PV would hold a national convention in the second week of October, after consultations with a broad array of groups ranging from Greens to academics and students to unions and the business sector.

Despite Silva's protestations it's fairly clear that the PV leadership is leaning towards Serra. Notably, the PV's high profile Fernando Gabeira, who lost his bid for Rio governor, defied Silva and unilaterally gave his support to Serra on 4 October.The PV's vice president, Alfredo Sirkis, newly elected to the federal congress, immediately stressed that Gabeira was speaking in a personal capacity.

The PV and the PSDB are already in alliance in São Paulo (Serra's home state), governed by the PSDB and its allied Democratas (DEM). The day after the first round, rumours were already doing the rounds that Serra was thinking of ousting his vice-presidential running mate, Antônio Pedro de Siqueira Indio da Costa (of the DEM), in favour of either Silva herself or, more plausibly, Gabeira, who could usefully get out the vote for Serra in Rio, governed by the PT's main coalition ally, the PMDB. Costa and the DEM denied the rumours.

Over in the PT, the party president José Eduardo Dutra is leading the campaign to woo Silva. Rousseff effusively praised Silva's election result but appears less convinced that Silva will come on board. Silva's fractious end to her relationship with the Lula government appears a real hurdle (see sidebar).

The PT is very nervous. Despite the fact that Rousseff goes into the second round having won a majority of states and needing only a few more points to win, the run off is a very different game. Rousseff needs to reconnect with the educated middle classes, whom Silva won over with her 'third way' ethical and green alternative. Two more televised presidential debates will pit Rousseff and Serra head to head for the first time, having tiptoed around each other in the first round debates. They will also have an equal amount of free political advertising time (Rousseff had a big advantage in the first round). Both will need to be much clearer about their policies, which were all but lost in the backward looking comparisons of the Lula-Cardoso eras that dominated the first round. Silva will push them to talk about environmental issues, particularly the question of sustainable growth. Rousseff will also have to appease the evangelical and Catholic voters that rejected her in favour of Silva.  

The PT is also worried about the demobilisation of the coalition campaign in the big states that were decided in the first round, such as Bahí­a, Rio de Janeiro, Rio Grande do Sul and Pernambuco -   in whose cities most of Silva's 19.6m
voters are concentrated. The plan of action is to get President Lula even more involved with Rousseff. To start he will visit key states to congratulate the newly elected coalition governors and chivvy them to get out the vote again on 31 October. The PT is anxious that Serra does not gain early momentum on the back of Rousseff's disappointing first round result. PT strategists stress that it's crucial that Rousseff sits well atop the first pre-31 October opinion polls.

• Silva's ethical appeal
  Pollsters belatedly attributed Marina Silva's strong result to her support among Brazil's evangelicals, which make up some 20% of the population (Silva is an fervent evangelical) and anti-abortionists suspicious of Dilma Rousseff's ambivalent stance on abortion. With the benefit of hindsight, it now appears that Rousseff   and the PT   underestimated the growing political reach of the country's conservative religious factions, including the powerful evangelical Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, which came out heavily in favour of Silva from the pulpit - preaching   to those poor factions that the PT, perhaps presumptously, considered its natural electorate.   Lastly, the young, urbane middle class also swung behind Silva's ethical and environmental message.
  

• No love lost between Rousseff and the Greens
  Marina Silva stepped down as environment minister in May 2008, citing disenchantment with the Lula government's economic policies and pointing the finger at the productive ministries, then led by Dilma Rousseff in her capacity as minister of the presidency. Silva directly accused Rousseff, who led the government's national infrastructure development programme, the PAC, of riding roughshod over environmental concerns as part of the prioritisation of (vote winning) public investment schemes, designed to promote faster economic growth.