While much has been made of Brazil’s economic downturn, a toxic political climate is equally responsible for the current woes of President Dilma Rousseff and her government. Mauricio Savarese looks at the complex backdrop to the crisis.

By Mauricio Savarese
São Paulo

There is no easy explanation as to why, just under a year after being reelected by a narrow margin, President Dilma Rousseff runs the risk of not completing her term in office. It took respected consultancy firm Eurasia months, for example, to weigh up all the factors and raise the chances of her resigning or being impeached from 30% to 40%. But one thing is easy to predict: whatever the outcome, the current climate of polarization is here for a while – perhaps even until after the next elections.

Although opposition militants argue that Rousseff has only herself to blame for her troubles, pro-government forces place the blame on kingmaker party the PMDB, and defeated PSDB presidential candidate Aécio Neves. Leftist groups continue to defend Rousseff’s mandate but oppose her fiscal policies. While it is difficult to know where the saga will end, there are clear reasons behind Brazil’s political crisis.

The aggressive, toxic campaigns waged by both candidates in last year’s elections are as good a place to start as any. Rousseff came close to defeat against Neves, who himself only made it to the second round run-off on the final straight – environmentalist Marina Silva had been running second in the polls until then. And the contest was only so tight in the first place because of a sluggish economy and the emergence of a new wave of scandals involving key members of the government. In 2013 most bets had been on Rousseff’s reelection.

After a narrow defeat, Neves barely recognized his opponent’s victory in his concession speech. Such a tight margin, the closest in Brazilian history, had two immediate effects: a smaller mandate for the winner and more sore loser griping from the other side. Impeachment talk emerged right after Rousseff was proclaimed the victor, and today it often feels as though the election never ended.

After a leftist-sounding campaign, the president turned her attention to the financial markets in a manner that shocked many of her voters. After much indecision, she picked American-trained Bradesco Bank economist Joaquim Levy to be her Finance Minister, and appointed a number of other conservative ministers, some of whom would have been more comfortable in a Neves cabinet. Before the end of the year she had managed to lose touch with her base, while at the same time failing to win over her adversaries.

Since then the crisis has all been about the government’s controversial ally, the PMDB. The centrist party, which has itself been associated with scandal more than a few times in the past, was never 100% on Rousseff’s side, and today it would be a push to argue that even 50% of its deputies and senators are still with the president. During the campaign some of the party’s key figures were already placing their bets on Neves, and the division has remained even after the president’s victory. Opposition forces were strong enough to elect her main PMDB adversary, congressman Eduardo Cunha, to the role of Speaker of the Lower House until February 2017.

Rousseff believed that her decisions would restore the credibility she had lost in her first term thanks to growing spending and the use of backpedaling, a form of delaying repayments to lenders who had provided money to pay for welfare programs, making the country’s books appear more robust than was actually the case – a breach of fiscal responsibility laws say the opposition, but common accounting practice according to the government.

But in fact those unpopular steps, which contradicted profoundly with the tone of Rousseff’s campaign, were eating away at her popularity. The Lower House, led by Cunha, began to think of ways to put further pressure on an already unpopular president.

The lack of enthusiasm for the new administration had been evident since January 1st, when Rousseff’s somewhat flat inauguration was attended by less than 5,000 people – around 10 times fewer than at the start of her first term. Rousseff picked a number of ministers that patently had few qualifications for their positions, solely to maintain the support of their parties in Congress. Cunha’s election as speaker may have been the first sign that the strategy had failed, but others have followed.

Despite being involved in multiple scandals, including the Petrobras investigation, Cunha is a wily strategist. With the speakership he had the power to define the Lower House voting schedule, and to choose which congressional inquiries would move forward. This latter power includes what is described as “an atomic bomb” in Brasilia: in other words, whether or not to allow an impeachment process against the president to progress.

When Rousseff’s popularity sunk to single digits, all the opposition, which had been repeatedly stirring up protests against the president, needed was a motive to seek impeachment, and in Cunha they had found a willing ally.

Three possibilities have now emerged. One is to find a direct link between the president and the Petrobras scandal, while another option is for the Superior Electoral Court to strip both her and Vice-President Michel Temer of their positions because of the use of supposedly illegal funds in their election campaign. The third potential outcome, meanwhile, is to accuse Rousseff of breaking fiscal responsibility laws in the form of the aforementioned backpedaling.

All these three possibilities remain in play, but none are conclusive. If proven, they would also result in different outcomes: in the first and the third cases, Temer would take over from Rousseff, although rumors have suggested the vice-president himself may be implicated in the Petrobras scandal – something he has already denied.

If both Rousseff and Temer go, runner-up Neves would take over, with even those in opposition recognizing that such a decision by the Superior Electoral Court would not necessarily give them the legitimacy they would need to govern. Since the restoration of democracy in Brazil in 1985, impeachment charges have been brought only against President Fernando Collor de Mello, in 1992, when he was directly linked to corruption scandals that had emerged during his term, showing the difference between the two cases.

Rousseff has relied on a number of factors to keep her job. The first is her turbulent yet enduring relationship with former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the main power behind the Worker’s Party. She also hopes to maintain her alliance with the president of the Senate, Renan Calheiros, who could also yet be implicated in the Petrobras scandal. The third is the pragmatism of many business leaders, who think impeachment would represent a major setback for a young democracy.

Further complicating matters is that in the event that impeachment proceedings are instigated in the Lower House, Rousseff may decide to take her case to the Supreme Court. Unlike congressmen, Brazilian supreme court justices have little interest in the polls and nor are they yet much concerned with the investigations of the Petrobras scandal. It appears impossible to tell what the outcome of such an action might be. Brazil is not for beginners, as the songwriter Tom Jobim once memorably said – and the complexities of the current political crisis show that his words are as true now as ever.

Increasingly, Brazilians are blasé about two things most everyone used to be excited about – the FIFA World Cup and a wave of protests. We’ll see which way the pendulum swings again come June. Above, last year’s protests become the theme of a small ‘bloco’ at this year’s Carnaval.

By Mauricio Savarese

Attitudes went from “This is going to massive,” “Everyone will be fired up” and “It will change Brazil forever” to “Not again…,” “I can’t wait for this to be over” and “There is just too much hype.”

Radicals aside, there are now few Brazilians overly enthusiastic about either of the two mutually antagonistic events taking place in the country this year: the FIFA World Cup and the protests that have rocked the streets since June. Interest faded very slowly; people got sick of infrastructure issues around the World Cup and violence from agitators and police during protests.

Now these notions are measurable. When the massive protest movement kicked off, pollster Datafolha said 81% of Brazilians supported them, against everything-that-is-wrong-here. That support has now dropped to 52%. Even worse for activists: the criticism of their agenda is rising. Now 42% of Brazilians are against any protests at all. Only 15% held this view last summer, during the Confederations Cup.

Another poll could be seen as a sign that the government’s nationalistic campaign for the World Cup had some effects. Pollster MDA says 85% of Brazilians believe there will be protests during football’s creme de la creme, but only 15% considered actually being in them. That could lead one to believe there is widespread support for hosting the tournament. But that isn’t the case, either.

Almost 51% of Brazilians say they wouldn’t support a bid to host the tournament if it were to be made today, MDA says. Datafolha says 52% of locals don’t approve of FIFA’s main event being hosted here. In November 2008, impressive 79% of the people were for it all.

We can guess at motives. Four World Cup stadia (São Paulo, Curitiba, Cuiabá, and Porto Alegre) are still at risk and many reject the high amount of money spent, which they’d like to see go somewhere else,

There is usually bitterness before big sporting events. Brazilians are showing that attitude now, but that doesn’t it support couldn’t skyrocket the moment the Cup starts and Brazil takes on Croatia in Corinthians Arena.

For protesters, the question is whether they can get support from those who are critical of the World Cup organization, but not as excited to parrot their ubiquitous “there will be no Cup” slogan.

For football fans, the best bet seems to be on using well the period between June 12 and July 13, despite the fact that Brazil neither prepared appropriately nor invested as wisely as necessary. They can argue that a proper debate on how things went would be more appropriate in the general elections, in October. They will have 64 matches watched by billions supporting their cause.

But Brazil is a surprising country, and protesters could break that advantage if they get back in touch with the aspirations of the majority. That is not the case now. If they insist with the politics of no that have made people less interested, it may even be difficult even to get Brazilians to the polling stations later this year and deliver some attention to their grievances.

As of now, the only thing massive thing most Brazilians can relate to is sheer boredom.

By Dom Phillips

Brazilian presidential hopeful Marina Silva took everybody by surprise Saturday when she joined forces with Eduardo Campos of the PSB party. The two will team up to fight the 2014 presidential election, with Silva most likely campaigning as Campos’s vice-president. Now the race suddenly looks interesting.

Joining an existing party was the only way Silva could stay in the race, after Brazil’s Supreme Electoral Court denied her attempt to found her own party, the Sustainability Network (Rede Sustentabiledade) last week – see Friday’s blog on this.

Silva spent Friday night locked in meetings, local media said. Once the partnership with Campos was announced, its political advantages were immediately obvious.

Silva is an environmentalist, evangelical and political outsider who came third in the 2010 election and is currently running second in the polls. She is also seen by many as the candidate most likely to capitalise on the frustrations expressed by the hundreds of thousands of Brazilians who took to the streets to protest a range of issues, including the political system itself, in June.

But she has a weak point: the economy, which is not her specialty. And as Brazil’s economy has been barely growing for a couple of years, it’s also President Dilma Rousseff’s Achilles heel. This is perhaps Campos’s strong point: he graduated in economics and as the governor of Pernambuco state in North East Brazil is seen as both business-friendly and as having done a good job in a state that grew more than the rest of Brazil last year – 2.3% compared to Brazil-wide GDP growth of just 0.9%.

He has the administrative experience she lacks and his PSB (Partido Socialista Brasileira, Brazilian Socialist Party) is, like him, more popular in the North East. Both Campos and Silva served as ministers under former president Lula (Silva was Environment, Campos Science and Technology). Both want to break the political deadlock that has seen Brazil ruled by either the ruling PT, Workers Party or Partido dos Trabalhadores, of President Dilma Rousseff (2003-present), or the PSDB (Partido da Social Democracia Brasileira, Brazilian Social Democracy Party), under President Fernando Henrique Cardoso, 1995-2003), for 18 years.

Now, where recent poll figures were giving Rousseff a possible first-round win, suddenly a second election round looks likely. Worse, for Rousseff, the PT and the PSDB, the intriguing combination of Campos, a governor with administrative experience, and Silva, a populist outsider, means a potential third political force.

The latest poll gave President Rousseff 38% of intentions to vote, Marina Silva 16%, the PSDB’s probable candidate Aécio Neves 11% and Eduardo Campos 4%. Campaigning proper has yet to begin.

By Dom Phillips

Last night, in a tense, high-profile ruling, Brazil’s electoral court decided that a new party set up by Marina Silva, a popular opposition politician, could not fight in next year’s presidential elections.

Silva’s party, the Rede Sustentabilidade, or Sustainability Network, had not registered enough members at election notary offices throughout Brazil by deadlines. This Folha piece, in English, has more detail.

Given that Marina Silva came third in the last election with nearly 20% of the vote, currently polls at 16% of potential votes compared to President Dilma Rousseff’s 38%, and is widely regarded as the main politician who could benefit from the outpouring of frustration that sent millions of Brazilians onto the streets in June, this has further exposed the weakness of Brazil’s party system.

Marina Silva can still join one of the many existing parties – and thus fight the election – and we’ll find out tomorrow if she does.

Last time Silva was a Green Party candidate. She is an environmentalist, and evangelical Christian, from a poor Amazon upbringing, who only learned to read and write at 16. Her new party needed to present 492,000 signatures which had been registered at electoral notaries all over Brazil. Rede was around 50,000 signatures short, but claimed that electoral notaries had rejected around 100,000 signatures without sufficient explanation.

The party wanted the court to take these into consideration – but the court said it had to follow the law. The same court has just allowed the creation of two other new parties who did have enough signatures registered, despite accusations that both parties falsified signatures.  Their creation takes the number of parties in Brazil to a dizzying 32.

This blog piece by Fernando Rodrigues for Folha’s sister news site UOL on September 19 reported accusations that new party Solidarity had falsified signatures – even the signature of the boss of an electoral notary office in Várzea Paulista. Superior Electoral Court judge Luciana Lóssio raised allegations regarding suspicions over signatures presented by the 32nd party approved, PROS (Partido Republicano da Ordem Social – The Republican Party of Social Order). An electoral notary office in Belo Horizonte had counted signatures twice, Folha reported.

PROS is likely to support the government, Brazilian media says. It is also linked to evangelical churches.

Brazil has an important evangelical vote, which caused Dilma problems in the last election when she was accused by both Catholics and evangelicals of being pro-abortion and had to come out publicly against it. This story has some of the contradictory positions Rousseff has taken on the issue (basically, from pro to anti).

A new, evangelical-friendly party which potentially supports the government is much less of a challenge to Rousseff than Rede, an anti-government environmentalist party led by a popular evangelical, would have been. Each party also gets set an allocation of television time for campaigning, depending on how many seats it has in Congress. PROS could use its TV time to support Dilma’s campaign.

Brazil is effectively ruled by an unwieldy coalition, controlled by Rousseff’s ruling PT, Partido dos Trabalhadores, or Workers’ Party, and based on mutual-interest deals.

As a detailed, well-researched special report on Brazil just published by the Economist magazine observes: “The relationship between the executive and legislative branches is openly mercenary, with the president trading pork-barrel spending for support from her huge, ideologically incoherent coalition.”

With the demise of Rede, a small window for possible real change may have closed:  Silva is an idealist who quit her job as Lula’s environment minister in protest at what she saw as its lack of support for her, but she might just be the only politician with the stomach to contemplate the urgent structural and political reform Brazil so desperately needs. That is what she says, at least.

She has been a political outsider since leaving government and enjoys support among the many Brazilians who regard all politicians with deep cynicism. Understandably so, given the endemic graft and unwillingness to change that characterises Congress. But she is not seen as business-friendly nor particularly qualified to deal with Brazil’s complex and unwieldy economy, currently stumbling.

Political alienation, particularly among the youth, is growing. This story in business daily Valor explored how few of the youth involved in mass demonstrations in June have joined any political party, and how many have no plans to do so.

Come next year’s World Cup, we can expect more protestors and riot police on the streets. But Brazilian politicians are trying to hold back the tide. As the Economist noted, the size of Brazil’s middle class today and the depth of frustration it feels on a range of issues, means that sooner or later, something will have to change.

This year, the country didn’t deliver on everything international observers thought the country had promised, but Brazil still remains one of the 21st century’s most remarkable success stories. 2013 could be decisive.

For those paying attention to Brazil headlines, 2012 was mostly a bad year. For some, it was enough to re-evaluate the status as an emerging power that the country has euphorically held for years now.

The economy barely grew, and government involvement in the economy has surprised some international investors. The ruling Worker’s Party was dragged through the mud repeatedly as the Supreme Court handed down sentence after sentence for a vote-buying scandal from Lula’s first term. The PCC returned to the scene in São Paulo, and a small-scale war broke out between police and the gang. New laws dismayed environmentalists concerned for the Amazon.

But Brazil still remains one of the most remarkable success stories of the 21st century. This is true for a few simple reasons. 40 million people have risen out of poverty, and inequality has decreased. Despite the slowdown, unemployment is at record lows, and wages have continued to rise. Perhaps most importantly, we saw last week that President Dilma has an eye-popping 78 percent approval rating.

In short, the vast majority of the population support the way the country is being run, people are better off than ever, and society is more just. It’s important to remember that this is the whole point of economic growth and democracy in the first place. The results are there. We shouldn’t confuse means with ends, as is so easy to do when we journalists get caught up in the latest GDP numbers, or scandal.

Even some of the the year’s worst stories have a positive flip-side. As ugly as the corruption trial was, many believe that the tough sentences handed down to high-level politicians could signal an end to political impunity in the country. And despite the tragedy of a spike in violence in São Paulo’s periphery, the state’s murder rate is still much lower than it was a few years ago.

When Brazilians and observers (justifiably) complain about the country at the moment, a little context can be uplifting. What has the world been going through for the last 12 years, especially since 2007? How many countries in the world can you point to with: rising standards of living, reduced inequality, and widespread, long-lasting contentment with leadership? This is certainly not how things feel in my native California, or in Europe. And all of this in an open, liberal democracy? I can’t think of many examples.

But of course, nothing guarantees this will continue, and 2013 could be a decisive year. We can’t expect wages to rise forever without economic growth returning, and so the world will be holding their breath until it does, as expected next year.  But if instead there is more stagnation, or more of what the international community sees as state meddling in the economy, international investors could finally give up and concentrate on countries like Mexico or Colombia. And it’s hard to imagine how the PT would be seen by the people if any of the party’s social gains were reversed.

I personally don’t think either of those doom scenarios will come to pass. We’ll see. But for now, here are some of the bad, the good, and the interesting stories from 2012.

These are summaries – click the links for more in-depth info.

The bad

Corruption –

We watched all year as high-level politician after high-level politician was brought down for the ‘mensalão’ scandal from 2003, and a new hero of the opposition (and anti-corruption movements) was born in the form of Joaquim Barbosa (pictured above).

Violence –

War broke out for the first since 2006 in São Paulo. Again, the major parties were the PCC, the state’s main gang, and the military police. The latter lost over 100 officers to (mostly) targeted executions, while the murder rate in SP jumped.

The economy –

This is the big one. After growing 7.5% in 2010 (and causing us in the international press to rush here), then slowing to 2.7% in 2011, we may not do much better than 1% in 2012. Even more awkward was the moment when Finance Minister Guido Mantega joined the rest of analysts in wildly overestimating third-quarter growth, leading The Economist to call for his dismissal. Needless to say, President Dilma was not pleased to hear this from the British magazine.

But the economy is expected to pick up in 2013, thanks not only in part to the huge cut in interest rates carried out this year, which have finally come down to the levels of a normal country. And in reality, the 7.5% growth year was a statistical blip after -0.3% in crisis-hit 2009. Taken together, the economy had been growing at 3.6% a year, close to the average over the last 20 years, and to what we’re likely to see over the next few years.

But more worrying is that some investors believe, whether rightly or wrongly, that the government has begun to micro-manage the economy and that the possibility of intervention may be unpredictable. Much of this has to do with the decision to lower energy prices. I personally think they’re wrong, or at least that this was a problem of the government’s way of communicating the changes rather than the changes themselves. But some people are on edge, and this is especially important, as a drop in investment is the real culprit for the bad numbers.

And of course, there remains so much that Brazil should and could do to increase productivity and upgrade its growth model.

Infrastructure –

We are still waiting on this one. This is one part of Brazil’s economy that most desperately needs to be resolved, and we’ve still only seen baby steps.

The environment –

My visit to the Amazon this year was not pretty, both because of the persistence of slave labor and the obvious destruction of the rain forest. Things took a turn for the depressing for environmental activists as the government rolled back protections in 2012.

The good

Politics –

Whatever you think of the ruling Worker’s Party (PT), it is undeniable that if you use the standard most often applied to political parties, Lula and Dilma’s have overseen a truly remarkable success story since 2003. Lula left office one of the most popular leaders in the world, and two years into her term, Dilma is already widely supported. 78 per cent approval is a breathtaking figure. And this after everything that happened in 2012.

Despite the mensalão mess, the PT did very well in municipal elections this year, and took back São Paulo, South America’s largest city. If 2014 elections were held today, all polls indicate Dilma would win by a landslide.

And without a doubt, the country plays a much larger role on the world stage than it did in 2002.

The PT, like everyone else, could improve greatly, but widespread support and a rising nation means you are winning, big. This is a tough act to follow.

The real economy –

As I mentioned above, for all the dismal numbers, life on the ground still feels better than ever. Families are still rising out of poverty. The explanation for this is a little complicated, but the reality is there. It can’t last forever like this, of course, but forever hasn’t happened yet.

Justice –

The flip side to the mensalão mess is a justice system which really has teeth for the first time anyone can remember. This has always been the case for the poor, but now politicians can be on the hook, too. This has many hoping they will think twice in the future.

Even some police are being held to account. Some of those that gunned down suspected members of the PCC and, by all accounts, set off this year’s wave of violence, are now in jail.

World Cup preparations –

For years we wondered if Brazil would be ready to host the World Cup. We haven’t sorted out our infrastructure problems, but it looks like at least the stadiums will be ready.

My personal take is the following: The World Cup will go the way Brazil does for most visitors. Something or another will go wrong. They’ll be stuck in traffic, or miss a flight, or end up spending more than they expected on this or that. But those things will be heavily outweighed by the charm of the country and the fun of the event, and most will go home raving about Brazil.

Cost of living –

For us foreigners, it’s been good news that the real has come down significantly this year. Brazil is no longer so maddeningly expensive. For Brazilians, the cost of living hasn’t changed much.

Corinthians –

“The people’s team” from São Paulo took the world club championship, and gave Brazilian football a much-needed boost. This also meant lots of traffic and nonstop fireworks in the city, but overall it was very good for the country, and for South America.

The unexpected and interesting

Lula back on the scene –

I suppose it was more of an anomaly that he was actually gone for a while. But after recovering quickly from cancer, the former president was given a grand welcome back and got to work quickly, helping out in this year’s municipal elections. Crucially, he has so far floated above the mess of the mensalão scandal, and insisting he know nothing of the scheme. We’ll see if he can keep this up in 2013.

Music –

2012 was a much more interesting year musically than 2011, in my opinion. We saw the rise of Brazilian hip hop to the mainstream, “techno brega” from the Amazon in the form of Gaby Amarantos, and funky pop from the likes of Tulipa Ruiz. Here’s our full interview with Emicida, and Criolo’s will be posted next year.

Eike Batista –

He did not have a good year. There was the unfortunate incident with his son, Thor. Then he attracted lots of negative attention, and fell quite dramatically from his position as Brazil’s richest man.

Race –

Hard to categorize this one as good or bad, but the country stared two deep-seated problems in the face this year: relations with indigenous populations, and the government’s approach to black Brazilians.

Tourism –

The sector is doing quite well, but it has nothing to do with the gringos. The sector is almost entirely powered by Brazilians moving around their own country.

The rebirth of the center –

Long more famous for being “Crack land” than anything else, we saw interesting new movements coming up from the street.

Evangelical power –

Much to the dismay of bien-pensant liberals, Brazil’s numerous, and often unsettling, Evangelical Christian churches revealed themselves as an ever more potent political force.

Exhibitionist turn –

We saw Brazil’s sub-celebrity realitytainment industry power into the same bizarre gears we’ve been accustomed to around the world. First, there was the sex, or perhaps rape, transmitted live on Big Brother Brasil. Then we had the young girl who auctioned off her virginity for $800,000.

Petrobras – Graça Foster –

One of South America’s largest companies inherited a true rags-to-riches story as Graça Foster took over. Here’s hoping she can help navigate Petrobras out of its current mess.

Niemeyer –

And finally, we bid a sad farewell to nation-defining visionary architect Oscar Niemeyer, who passed at 104 years old. Here’s an interview I did with him last year, and perhaps next year I’ll post my pictures from his 104^th birthday party.

Here’s hoping 2013 goes better. Happy New Year.

Follow @Vinncent

By last Sunday every city in Brazil had selected a new mayor. This will affect everyone here differently, as they will be governed at the local level by one of the 19 – nineteen! – parties running the country’s city halls. But what happened on a national level?

There are some good background sources, such as our LA Times story, Gabriel Elizondo’s blog, and Fernando Rodrigues’ excellent and extended analysis (in Portuguese) of who won and lost out this electoral season.

But here’s a stab at drawing some broad lessons about shifts in Brazil’s politics.

1. Lula still matters, a lot. The big take-away headline is that the PT (Worker’s Party) took back South America’s most important city after eight years. This was not expected. Fernando Haddad was way behind at the outset of the election, after being hand-picked by Lula. Lula and Dilma’s campaigning paid off in a big way, in what turned out to be a spectacular victory for the PT. The Mensalão looks like it played its part, but did not take down the party like some thought it would.

2. But Lula is not all-powerful. His man lost sorely in a close election in Salvador, the country’s third-largest city, and the PT candidate lost Fortaleza too.

3. More parties, more mess? Brazil’s multi-party system is notoriously complicated, notoriously hard to explain, and notoriously difficult to govern. This has gotten worse. The amount of actively ruling parties has gone from 16 to 19. This means more of the shifting alliances and allegiance-buying that probably in some ways has led to Brazil’s historic problem with corruption.

As this excellent guest post at the FT states:

The proliferation of political parties makes governing the country a particularly difficult and costly task. To pass legislation, presidents, governors and mayors often depend on heterogeneous governing coalitions of political parties whose allegiance has to be bought over and over again with pork and/or patronage jobs.

To get a sense of how messy things are, consider the following. The “Social Democratic Party” is different than the “Social Democratic Party of Brazil”. The former was recently created by the outgoing mayor of São Paulo as he split off from the right-wing “Democrats”, which is very different than the “Democratic Movement Party”, which has no ideological allegiance whatsoever but tends to always move towards power. The “Social Democratic Party” opposed Haddad in the election but might now support him in power. Our new vice-mayor is from the Communist Party of Brazil (different from the Brazilian Communist Party), which supported the new regressive Forestry Code. All of this feels a bit like satire.

[youtube gb_qHP7VaZE]

All of this makes governing the country much more difficult for Dilma. Many intelligent people think that she knows which challenging reforms Brazil needs to undertake, but that she also knows how outrageously difficult it would be to try to get these things through Congress. Easy to see why.

Follow @Vinncent

In many ways, political culture in South America’s two most-watched countries couldn’t be more different. Brazilian voters, like this one walking over campaign flyers yesterday, are less politicized, and choose between candidates who agree on the big questions.

Yesterday, Brazilians and Venezuelans went to the polls. Here, voters broadly voted to maintain the powers that be and gave President Dilma’s Worker’s Party a pleasant surprise by giving Fernando Haddad a shot to be mayor of São Paulo. Northwest of here, Venezuelans re-elected “controversial”* president Hugo Chávez again, setting him up for an astonishing twenty years in power.

The two countries are the most-watched in South America, and from outside, it may appear that since they share a border they have much in common. They do. But after being a correspondent in Caracas and watching elections there, and now covering votes here, it’s obvious that in many ways their political cultures couldn’t be more different.

Click here to see the LA Times summary of the Brazil election, or here for more detail from Folha, or below to continue to me explaining these differences.

Talking to voters yesterday in Penha, on the poor outskirts of São Paulo, I heard many people – many, many people – tell me they didn’t really know why they voted the way they did. Some said: Whatever, they are all the same, liars and cheats. Others said: Whatever, things are going fine, and I don’t know anything about these people, really.

In hyper-politicized, deeply divided Venezuela, hearing someone say something like this would be enough to make your head explode. It just doesn’t happen. Most Venezuelans you come across will have spirited, and most often well-thought out arguments as to why they support or do not support Chávez. You’re likely to disagree with around half of the conclusions, but they are informed opinions. Topics like socialism, capitalism, corruption, politicians, revolution and democracy fill their heads and barroom conversations far more often than they do here in Brazil.

Brazilians, in my experience, are far less political than Venezuelans. This can be explained a few ways, and can be seen as either good or bad.

It may be that Venezuelans have been forced to pay attention due to the transformative and conflictual nature of the Chávez government. It may also be that Brazilians pay less attention than they should. One should also mention that voting is mandatory in Brazil – meaning those who truly don’t care still cast ballots – and that Venezuela is a country with a revolutionary tradition, whereas in Brazil most historical advances were arrived at through compromise and smoothed over by ruling elites. Brazil never had a revolution, civil war, or any real open political conflict.

The second way Brazilian political culture is different than Venezuela’s is probably directly related to the first.

That is, that in Brazil, most of the major political parties broadly agree on what Brazil should be doing. Namely, more or less what they’ve been doing for 15 years. Despite the small differences between Lula’s PT and Fernando Henrique Cardoso’s PSDB that the two parties love to exaggerate, they both agree on the same kind of government. They oversaw, and continue to propoose, a more or less markets-friendly social democracy with a mid-sized state presence. This approach, combined with a boom in Chinese demand for commodities, has lifted 40 million people out of poverty and increased the country’s presence on the world stage, but of course has not solved by a long shot problems of shocking inequality, persistent corruption, and woefully lacking health and education systems.

If you compare the small disagreements within Brazil to the fights going on in Venezuela, they appear even tinier still. In Venezuela, plenty of people really do – despite the incredulence of much of the international press – want radical socialist revolution. And plenty of others there want a total break with everything Chávez has done, and share much more of Washington’s idea of development than Brasília is likely to soon.

Those fundamental questions are open in Venezuela, but in Brazil there is general agreement on a path. So perhaps, why should those here get too involved? No one yesterday in São Paulo seemed too concerned things could change much one way or another. In Venezuela, I’d be willing to wager, everyone was.

Follow @Vinncent

Photo Vincent Bevins 07 – 10 – 2012

*Sarcasm

Sunday is the first round of voting. In cases where there is no majority, the top two candidates go to a second round of voting a month later.

São Paulo – the rise of Evangelical Christian politics

The mayorship of South America’s largest city is extremely important, likened credibly to running a mid-sized country. And as anyone who has visited SP knows, this place is in dire need of good leadership.

We’ve had a big surprise here. The country’s two major parties, the PT (Partido dos Trabalhadores, or Worker’s Party, of Dilma and Lula fame), and the PSDB (the center-right party of the also much-revered Fernando Henrique Cardoso), have been shocked to find themselves trailing far behind Celso Russomano, the TV personality and candidate from the relatively new PRD, a party backed the Brazil’s increasingly powerful evangelical Christian churches.

This has terrified the traditional power structures and you have seen everyone coming together (other than the actual supporters of the man) to try to stop him. This includes the right-wing media, left-wing unions and parties as well as bien pensant middle-class liberal urban types. Most of Russomano’s supporters are the conservative poor, and some call his campaign a genuinely populist movement representing those who have long been neglected, and others call it the dangerous mixing of religion and politics.

But he is almost certainly going to the second round, so the question now is who is going with him. On the right we have José Serra, who was already mayor of São Paulo, but quit to run for president, against Dilma, and lose badly. That has not helped his image with the common man, and pollsters routinely find a large number of voters reject him.

Nevertheless, he’s ahead of Fernando Haddad, a relative newcomer for the PT, who has been pulling out all the stops (these stops are named Lula and Dilma) to get into the second round and give the city a left-of-center option. It could be close.

Here’s the most recent poll

Rio – Riding a wave of success vs. the gadfly critic

Incumbent Eduardo Paes (from catch-all centrist party PMDB) is overseeing a city which is booming, regaining much of its importance for the country, and which will host the Olympics in 2016. He should win easily and probably will. But the one person who may stop him from getting 50% of the vote Suday is Marcelo Freixo, the human rights advocate who famously inspired a character in blockbuster movie Tropa de Elite 2 (If you haven’t seen these two movies, but you are somehow reading this blog, you must).

Freixo is an extremely exciting figure for Rio’s middle-class lefties as well as many people in the favelas. This is an impressive spread, to say the least, and he’s a powerful critic of the way Rio is developing. Here is an interesting piece on him, if you’re interested.

Latest Datafolha poll on Rio

Check back here next week or follow me on twitter to see how this turns out, as well as more info on Brazil’s other major cities.

Follow @Vinncent

[Photo above – Haddad, Russomano, and Serra, plastered on a wall. Felipe Morozini]