Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff is in a tough fight for re-election, as she should be. During four years in office, the former Marxist guerrilla-turned-Socialist has presided over the stalling of Brazil’s once-booming economy, mounting corruption in the state bureaucracy and a public rebellion against poor services. The economy tipped into recession, with two consecutive quarters of negative growth, while inflation just hit 6.75 percent, the highest level in three years.
Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff is in a tough fight for re-election, as she should be. During four years in office, the former Marxist guerrilla-turned-Socialist has presided over the stalling of Brazil’s once-booming economy, mounting corruption in the state bureaucracy and a public rebellion against poor services. The economy tipped into recession, with two consecutive quarters of negative growth, while inflation just hit 6.75 percent, the highest level in three years.
The good news about Brazilian democracy, three decades after the end of military rule, is that Rousseff drew two serious challengers, both of whom promised to correct her statist excesses and who together collected 55 percent of the vote in last weekend’s first round.
The incumbent, who received 41.5 percent, will face Aecio Neves, a center-right former state governor, in a runoff Oct. 26.
The bad news for Brazil’s prospects as a would-be 21st-century superpower is that Rousseff remains favored to win re-election — in no small part because of her use of the populist demagoguery that has become a crutch for the Latin American left.
The president found herself suddenly challenged in last month’s campaigning by Marina Silva, an environmentalist and political outsider who soared in polls after the first candidate of her party died in a plane crash. Silva promised to fight corruption but also restore some free-market principles to economic policy, such as the independence of the central bank.
Rousseff, who had five times as much television advertising time as Silva, responded with a blitz of mendacious spots suggesting her opponent’s proposal — which would merely place Brazil on a par with the United States, European Union and other developed nations — would amount to handing the country over to a cabal of private bankers.
Silva also was accused, falsely, of seeking to dismantle an anti-poverty program Rousseff and her predecessor have used to move millions of Brazilians into the middle class.
The mudslinging took its toll: Silva sank to third in the first-round voting. And Rousseff hasn’t changed her tactics.
No sooner was Neves confirmed as her second-round opponent than she suggested he would “kneel down” for the International Monetary Fund and its orthodox economic prescriptions.
Rousseff is hardly the only incumbent to resort to negative campaigning, and the robustness of Brazil’s election debate is a good example for neighbors such as Venezuela and Bolivia, where autocratic-minded governments have stifled opposition. But her campaign augurs poorly for Brazil’s prospects if she were to win another four-year term. With the commodity price boom that fueled its recent growth slackening, state spending mounting and corruption unchecked, Brazil looks less and less like an emerging economic power.
Its political influence, too, is stunted by Rousseff’s stubborn support for the region’s undemocratic regimes and resistance to supporting the priorities of the democratic West, such as preventing a nuclear Iran or punishing Russia’s aggression against its neighbors.
If she is re-elected, Rousseff’s victory will almost certainly be free and fair — which is not something to be taken for granted in Latin America. But judging from the campaign thus far, it also will be ugly.
— Washington Post