Marina Silva could well be Brazil’s next president. She has to do more to prove she deserves that
September 6th, 2014 THE ECONOMIST
LESS than a month ago, Marina Silva was a vice-presidential candidate on a campaign heading for defeat in the first round of Brazil’s election on October 5th. It now looks increasingly possible that she will end up as the country’s leader. The tragic death in a plane crash of Eduardo Campos, the first choice of the Brazilian Socialist Party (PSB), sprang his running-mate to the top of the ticket. She is running neck-and-neck in the polls with Dilma Rousseff, the incumbent, and stealing support away from Aécio Neves, a centrist candidate who had looked like Ms Rousseff’s biggest rival (see article). Even if Ms Silva’s surge falters, she is poised to make it to the second round of voting, which she is predicted to win.
Ms Silva is no novice. She was a founder of the Workers’ Party (PT) that Ms Rousseff now heads, an environment minister in the government of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and came third in the 2010 presidential race. She appeals to the poor, from whose ranks she came; to the markets, which like her orthodox economic platform; and to ordinary Brazilians, who have a deep-seated desire for political change after two decades of rule by the PT and, before it, Mr Neves’s Party of Brazilian Social Democracy (PSDB). But if Ms Silva were to win the presidency of the world’s fifth-most-populous country and its seventh-largest economy, she would do so after only a few weeks of campaigning. That argues for extra scrutiny now.
Ms Silva needs to overcome two concerns. The first is a reputation for intransigence which, though often principled, would make it hard to run Brazil, where multi-party coalition government is the norm. She resigned as environment minister in 2008 because of opposition she encountered to green policies; she would not be able to walk out of the presidential palace on principle. Her Pentecostalist faith makes her illiberal in some areas: she has retracted Mr Campos’s support for gay marriage. Against this, she does seem to have become more pragmatic recently, working well with the business-friendly Mr Campos, tempering her hostility to big hydroelectric projects, and picking a vice- presidential candidate who is friendly to the agribusiness lobby that she used to scorn.
The second, related concern is executive experience. Ms Rousseff is already president; Mr Neves governed the state of Minas Gerais well for years. There are organisational question-marks over Ms Silva’s failure to register her own political party in time for this presidential campaign—she alleges chicanery, others say she started the process of registration too late. She knows little about economics and, even when Mr Campos was on the ticket, the PSB team looked sparse.
Then again, the benefits of experience can be overstated. Ms Rousseff was regarded as a competent manager before taking office, but her meddling has helped push Brazil into recession (see article). Ms Silva had some real achievements in her time as a minister, including programmes to tackle deforestation in the Amazon. And she has had the sense to listen to her economic advisers and pledge some sensible policies—fiscal rectitude, tax reform and more robust inflation-targeting.
More to prove
Put simply, Ms Silva still has to say more about how exactly a relative outsider would govern Brazil. At the moment there is too little substance and too much dreamy talk about a “new politics”, in which she would somehow eschew the usual horse- trading with other political parties and instead win support on a case-by-case basis. In her defence, she has had to start her campaign from scratch. But in the end the voters of Brazil have to make a choice whether to stick with the lacklustre Ms Rousseff, settle for the business-friendly Mr Neves, or gamble on the exciting but unclear Ms Silva. She has a month left to fill in the gaps in the picture.
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