Marina Silva wanted to be a nun. Now she could be Brazil’s next president.
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Version 0 of 1. RIO DE JANEIRO — A former grass-roots environmentalist who once dreamed of becoming a nun has stormed to the forefront in Brazil’s presidential campaign, just three weeks after joining the race. The first round of voting is still a month away. But Marina Silva’s dramatic rise in the polls as she seeks to unseat President Dilma Rousseff of the Workers Party has shaken the country’s political establishment. “She is something new, like Obama. Something that wasn’t expected. Talking a new language,” said José Moisés, a political-science professor at the University of Sao Paulo. “We are in front of a political phenomenon.” Silva, 56, who was the environment minister in the Workers Party government of hugely popular president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, has become the standard-bearer for the rival Brazilian Socialist Party (PSB). Polls show that support for her party has tripled since she was thrust into the race shortly after the Aug. 13 death of the original Socialist candidate in a plane crash. If this mixed-race activist from deep in the Amazon, who has a radical past in liberation theology, did become president, it would be a major step toward equality in a country still largely run by a privileged, white elite. Yet Silva appears less likely to provoke Western powers than Lula occasionally did. Her party program highlights ties with China and Latin America, but it also says that relations with the United States “need updating” and calls for a “mature, balanced and purposeful dialogue that doesn’t dramatize natural differences between partners with economic interests.” Recent polls show Silva and Rousseff each capturing about a third of the vote, with Aécio Neves, from the center-right Brazilian Social Democratic Party (PSDB), garnering about 15 percent. In a second-round simulation, a poll by the Brazilian Institute of Public Opinion and Statistics (IBOPE) shows Silva at 46 percent to Rousseff’s 39 percent, giving her victory. Rousseff had appeared to be a shoo-in for reelection. She was Lula’s handpicked successor, and the Workers Party has run Brazil since 2003. During a decade of economic growth, millions of Brazilians rose out of poverty. Eduardo Campos, the Socialists’ chosen candidate, was in third place with 9 percent support, according to an earlier IBOPE poll, when he was killed last month. Silva, his running mate, began her campaign in Recife days after 130,000 people attended Campos’s funeral. Winning the presidency would be a remarkable achievement for a woman who grew up in a poor family of Amazon rubber tappers, hoped to become a nun before turning to evangelical Christianity and learned to read when she was a teenager. Her mother was white and her father is a mix of black and Brazilian Indian ancestry, said Marília César, who wrote a 2010 biography of Silva. Silva’s growing band of supporters includes residents of Brazilian slums, or favelas, businesspeople who like her party’s “third way” program, and evangelical Christians, an increasingly powerful demographic in Brazil. She also attracts young, urban Brazilians who are disillusioned with politics. In research Moisés conducted this year, 82 percent said they did not trust political parties. A run of corruption scandals under Rousseff and Lula has exacerbated the distrust. “She is bringing the dissatisfaction of the Brazilians with the political system to the campaign,” Moisés said. Those sentiments were echoed in the enormous Rocinha favela in Rio de Janeiro, where Silva and other Socialist politicians campaigned last weekend. “She is going to fight, put things in order,” said Maria da Conceição, 54, rounding up her children. “We see sincerity in her.” Her friend Claudia Mendonça, 42, said she, too, will vote for Silva. “She is determined. She has strength. She has drive,” Mendonça said. “She is not promising the world.” Brazil’s economy officially went into recession in August, and inflation is hovering right at the government’s 6.5 percent ceiling — facts hurting Rousseff’s campaign and opening up space for Silva. Her Brazilian Socialist Party’s detailed government program was published Aug. 29. Neither the Workers Party nor the PSDB have its program ready yet. Proposals in the PSB program make Silva “our reliable agent of change,” said Tony Volpon, head of emerging-markets research for the Americas at Nomura Securities International in New York. These include inflation targets, an independent Central Bank, a free-floating exchange rate and an independent fiscal-responsibility council to evaluate public spending. “She is not only signaling changing policy. She is changing the institutional framework by which policies are made,” Volpon said. These fundamental changes were essential to restore growth and recover falling investments, he said. Silva wants to rescue Brazil’s ailing ethanol industry and focus more on alternative energy sources. This concerns the oil industry, which is gearing up production of Brazil’s vast “pre-salt” offshore oil reserves. “Her past as a fundamentalist and environmentalist makes people worried. They really don’t know what could happen,” said Adriano Pires of the Rio-based Brazilian Infrastructure Center consultancy. Silva has tried to allay such fears. “The pre-salt is a reality and continues being a priority,” she said in a recent interview with the Globo G1 news site, responding to questions from the public. Silva may get hurt indirectly by a scandal involving Petrobras. The state-controlled company’s former downstream director, Paulo Costa, in jail as part of an ongoing corruption investigation, has included Campos’s name on a long list of politicians he said were also involved in the scheme, according to a report in the anti-government news weekly Veja. Meanwhile, others worry that Silva’s religious beliefs will influence her decision-making. Clauses in the Socialist program that promoted same-sex marriage and the criminalization of homophobia were removed a day after its release. “This is a point that will lead to the loss of some votes for her,” Moisés said. He said the real test for Silva is how she grows as the campaign develops. “My analysis is that the leaders form themselves in the process,” he said. Rousseff, with five times as much television advertising time as Silva, as well as the support of Lula and a powerful party machine, will not be easy to beat. And although Silva appeals to some who are disillusioned with politics, cynicism runs deep. In the Rocinha favela, some residents viewed Silva as, at best, a less unpleasant incarnation of a political class that is beyond redemption. “A band of thieves. They only know how to take money from the poor and make promises,” said Lucicleide Alves, 33, working in a hole-in-the-wall seamstress workshop. The noise and bustle of Rocinha, where music blasted from every doorway and live chickens were being unloaded in crates from a truck, contrasted vividly with the nearby leafy quiet of Leblon, a beach suburb that is one of Rio’s most expensive areas. But there, too, cynicism was not hard to find. “You can’t trust the people in these jobs,” said Maria Moraes, 20, working in a high-end design shop. She had yet to decide on her vote. “It is between null and Marina Silva,” she said. “That’s better than repeating Dilma.” |