Presidential front-runner Marina Silva’s electoral partners have views that are inconsistent with her own, but they might win her the top job
You mustn't expect politicians in a democratic system to come up with ideologically pure, intellectually consistent policies. Their job is to put together a winning coalition of voters who have different and even conflicting interests, and if that requires compromises and even contradictions, so be it. But they must apear to be consistent, and Ms Marina Silva has mastered the art.
Until last month Ms Silva was the vice presidential candidate of the smallest of Brazil's three main parties, a woman with a national reputation as an environmental activist but little prospect of high political office. President Dilma Rousseff was cruising serenely towards re-election in the first round of the elections on October 5, despite the fact the Brazil's once-booming economy is in a recession. And then a small plane crashed.
Ms Silva was supposed to be on that plane, but changed her plans at the last moment. All seven people who were on board died, including the presidential candidate of the Brazilian Socialist Party, Eduardo Campos. With the election campaign already underway, the party, also known as PSB had no choice but to promote Ms Silva in his place, and suddenly the election became a real race.
Ms Silva is bright Green: Her own party, which she took into coalition with the PSB, is called the Sustainability Network. Even more importantly in a country where half the population is non-white, Ms Silva is a ‘caboclo’, the mixed-race combination of native Indian, Black and White that is common in the Amazon. On census returns, she calls herself Black. There has never been a serious presidential contender who was Black before.
Only two weeks after Ms Silva was chosen to replace Eduardo Campos, she has tripled the PSB's support in the opinion polls. There is now almost no chance that President Rousseff will win outright in the first round of the election. The polls predict that Ms Silva will come second to Ms Rousseff in that round — and then beat the incumbent by 47 per cent to 43 per cent of the votes in the run-off three weeks later.
All very well, but what would Ms Silva actually do as the President of BrazilIJ It's an important question, because Brazil, the world's fifth largest country (200 million people), is going through difficult times. Over the past 12 years the governing Workers' Party has lifted 40 million Brazilians out of poverty, but economic growth has now stalled. Many people blame the Government's highly protectionist policies.
Ms Silva is a plain-speaking woman with no allegations of corruption trailing her around (as they do so many other Brazilian politicians), but she has been remarkably unforthcoming on what she would do about the economy. This is because she now heads a political coalition whose major member, the PSB, is actually ‘business-friendly’, as they say.
Ms Silva's plans for the environment are equally obscure, beyond the well-known fact that she disapproves of giant hydroelectric dams in the Amazon (and she hasn't even cancelled any of them). She still talks like a Green, but her vice-presidential running mate, Mr Beto Albuquerque, was responsible for pushing a law legalising the use of genetically modified soybeans through Congress.
Indeed, Ms Silva's economic platform is practically identical to that of Centre-Right candidate Aecio Neves: She would end price controls and energy subsidies, strengthen the autonomy of the central banks, and ‘streamline’ (ie cut) the federal budget. On the other hand, despite her pursuit of business support she is still strong on environmental issues in general and an end to the deforestation of the Amazon in particular. She has put together a set of policies and a coalition of supporters that are inconsistent and sometimes downright contradictory, but they may deliver her into the presidency.