Despite the efforts by Brazil's ruling Workers Party to keep their plans for the future of Latin America's largest and most populous country under wraps, the party's weaknesses have not escaped the vigilant eyes of its rivals, among them Aécio Neves and his Brazilian Social Democracy Party (PSDB) and environmentalist Marina Silva and her Brazilian Socialist Party, If the decision to throw in the towel was an onerous one for the PSDB, even more difficult was working out a way to woo Silva's Socialist Party supporters. Ominously for Neves, no fewer than 39 million Brazilians either abstained, or spoiled their votes, in the 5 October poll, or considerably more than the 35 million that voted for Neves. A large segment of the Brazilian electorate obviously felt that the presidential hopeful should be left to his own devices in making his way to the presidency. Nevertheless, Neves seemed unperturbed and stressed during his presidential campaign the critical importance of land reform and environmental concerns in a bid to win over Silva's “green” supporters. Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, 66, whose Workers Party has run Brazil since 2003, won 41.59 per cent of the vote in the first-round poll on 5 October, or not quite enough to beat outright the PSDB's Neves, the darling of big business in Brazil. The latter has signalled that he will promulgate pro-business laws and put in place policies aimed at buoying up the faltering Brazilian economy should he be elected, thereby wooing the country's business community. “The truth is that Brazilians are far more concerned with the monsters of the present: high inflation, recession and corruption,” Neves said in criticisms of Rousseff and her Workers Party. Rousseff retorted that the business-friendly candidate would not necessarily be the winner in the tight presidential race. “Investors don't win elections in Brazil. They are won with the votes of the Brazilian people,” Rousseff said of her pro-business rival. Race also matters in Brazil and particularly so in Brazilian politics. Some 50 per cent of the Brazilian population is white, off-white, or aspiring to be white, and Neves, twice governor of the mineral-rich Minas Gerais state, like Rousseff is considered to be a branco, or white or off-white and originating from the country's original Portuguese colonists. The reason why Silva was incapable of qualifying for the 26 October run-off with 21.3 per cent of the vote is no secret: she is too black, not quite a preto, or pure “black” in the colour-conscious Brazilian parlance, but distinguished from Silva's mixed-race pardos. Neves, who had been trailing in third place in polls, came second with 33.55 per cent of the vote. He is the son of politicians Aécio Cunha and Inês Maria and hails from a political family in Minas Gerais. His maternal grandfather, Tancredo Neves, was a key figure in the democratisation of Brazil, winning the presidential elections in 1985 but dying before he took office. Both grandfather and grandson are Pisceans, born in March, which could be an ill-omen some superstitious Brazilians say. The daughter of an originally Bulgarian entrepreneur, Rousseff is a fiery Sagittarian who fought with various left-wing movements and Marxist militias including the National Liberation Command against the military dictatorship before being captured and jailed between 1970 and 1972. She also braved and survived lymphatic cancer and was then hand-picked by her predecessor, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, to stand as president, partly because, it was said at the time, as a former leftist freedom fighter she would nevertheless have an easier time with the country's private sector than Luiz Pinguelli Rosa, her rival in the Workers Party. Rousseff was inaugurated as Brazil's first woman president on 1 January 2011 and has since presided over the world's seventh-largest economy. Her mantra has been her campaign for social justice, though the NGO Transparency International's Corruption Perceptions Index still ranked Brazil 69th out of 178 countries in 2012. In spite of allegations of cronyism and corruption in government circles, and Rousseff's espousing of controversial “white elephant” projects such as the hydroelectric dam projects in the Amazon Basin and the construction of the Belo Monte Dam, her government has been approved by 63 per cent of Brazilians, while her personal approval rating has been anything up to 79 per cent. However, if Rousseff is really willing to make the deep structural changes that Brazil needs, she will need to strike up a political bargain with her adversaries on the left and the right. This will be a tricky task, as she cannot please both. It remains to be seen whether the revolutionary freedom fighter of yesteryear will be willing to take pragmatic political risks in pursuit of structural reforms. Many local and international critics, among them Greenpeace, Amazon Watch, and the indomitable indigenous activist the Xingu chief Raoni Metuktire, have vigorously opposed Rousseff. But recent polls suggest that her environmentalist adversaries have ceased to pose a serious threat to her. In the elections held in Brazil on 5 October to elect the president, the National Congress, the state governors and state legislatures, Rousseff and her party won, though not resoundingly. Since no candidate in the presidential and gubernatorial elections received more than 50 per cent of the vote, a second-round run-off will be held on 26 October. In this new period of political instability, Rousseff has begun to put out commercial and economic feelers to the outside world, expanding Brazil's presence in the international financial and commodities markets. Coffee, corned beef and soybeans are no longer Brazil's main foreign-exchange earners, and aircraft, automobiles and electrical equipment are today its main and fastest-growing exports. The country is now the fourth-largest car market in the world. It is also a member of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa), the emerging economies that are aspiring, with the possible exception of South Africa, for superpower status. All five are already regional powers, but none are as comfortable in its regional domain as Brazil. It is against this backdrop that the Brazilian elections are taking place. Rousseff remains the front-runner, even though the Brazilian Socialist Party's Eduardo Campos, a “third way” candidate who was in third place in polls, was killed in a plane crash on 13 August, allowing his running mate Marina Silva to triple his share of the vote and poll equally with Rousseff in advance of the first-round vote. But Silva has failed to end the horse-trading of Brazilian politics, with the presidency invariably going to the candidate of either of the country's two big parties. Widening voter apathy will also be in Rousseff's favour on 26 October. On Monday, Silva was urging her supporters to back Neves, and the latter will need to set limits on how far he is willing to woo the left in pursuit of the presidency. For the moment, Silva has been playing the environmental card, citing Neves's commitment to environmental concerns as a reason for supporting him. She has cited Neves's about-face enthusiasm for the environment, but for the moment it all smacks of gesture politics, both on his part and on hers.
