Challenger Upends Brazilian Race for Presidency
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Version 0 of 1. RIO DE JANEIRO — When Dilma Rousseff and Marina Silva were both cabinet ministers, they clashed on everything from building nuclear power plants to licensing huge dams in the Amazon. Ms. Rousseff came out on top, emerging as the political heir to President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and ultimately succeeding him as president. But she now finds herself locked in a heated race with Ms. Silva, an environmental icon who is jockeying for the lead in polling ahead of the Oct. 5 election as an insurgent candidate repudiating the power structure she helped assemble. Ms. Silva’s upending of the presidential race is a symbol of the antiestablishment sentiment that has roiled Brazil, including anxiety over a sluggish economy and fatigue with political corruption. Her rising popularity also taps into shifts in society like the rising clout of evangelical Christian voters and a growing disquiet with policies that have raised incomes while doing little to improve the quality of life in Brazilian cities. “Marina differs from other politicians” in this election “in that she came almost from nothing,” said Sonia Regina Gonçalo, 34, a janitor, referring to Ms. Silva, who was born into extreme poverty in the far reaches of the Amazon. “She’s the ideal candidate for this time in Brazil.” Thrust to the fore after her running mate, Eduardo Campos, died in a plane crash in August, Ms. Silva, 56, has a background with few parallels at the highest levels of Brazilian politics, allowing her to resonate with voters across the country. If elected, she would be Brazil’s first black president, a milestone in a country where most people now identify themselves as black or mixed race, but where political power is still concentrated in the hands of whites. One of 11 children born to rubber tappers who lived like sharecroppers in Acre, a state on Brazil’s western fringe, Ms. Silva was illiterate until age 16. As a child, she endured mercury poisoning, malaria, hepatitis and leishmaniasis, a flesh-eating disease caused by sand-fly bites, creating health problems that she still deals with today. As a teenager, she entered a Roman Catholic convent to become a nun, but left to work as a maid in the home of civil servants in Rio Branco, Acre’s capital. After completing a high school equivalency program, she went to a public university in Acre, participating in a radical theater troupe with ties to Trotskyist groups. As a student, Ms. Silva joined the Communist Party, but a bigger revelation came when she met the environmental leader Chico Mendes, adhering to his movement of rubber tappers and working closely with him before he was assassinated in 1988. That same year, she won her first election, to Rio Branco’s City Council as a candidate of the leftist Workers Party, the party of Ms. Rousseff and her predecessor. But Ms. Silva broke from the Workers Party in 2009 to mount her first bid for the presidency, running under the Green Party. Now, the two rival candidates represent opposing camps in the country’s leftist political establishment. Ms. Rousseff, a former member of an urban guerrilla group, has a powerful story of hardship and resilience herself, having been jailed and tortured by Brazil’s military dictatorship. As a politician, Ms. Rousseff is often referred to in Brazil as a “developmentalist,” a nod to policies aggressively seeking to harness Brazil’s natural resources, from iron ore to offshore oil, to expand the economy under the sway of huge state companies. Ms. Silva, who was environment minister when Ms. Rousseff was chief of staff in the Lula government, supports a far bigger role for renewable energy sources like solar, wind and biomass, while prioritizing the protection of the Amazon rain forest. The fact that Brazil’s presidential race has been narrowing to two women from the Lula government who opposed military rule reflects the consolidation of Brazil’s democracy since the 1980s. But each has also had to make significant compromises, showing how that democracy tends to moderate leaders with radical origins. In Ms. Rousseff’s case, she has few options but to govern in a coalition with the Brazilian Democratic Movement, a scandal-plagued centrist party that wields considerable power within the vast public bureaucracy. Otherwise, the Workers Party would have had little chance of passing major legislation in Brazil’s fractious Congress. Ms. Silva has distanced herself from the Workers Party’s handling of the economy, which went into recession this year, by luring advisers with more market-friendly policies, like relaxing controls on energy prices. She chose a politician with close ties to agribusiness groups as her running mate. Ms. Silva also differs considerably from much of the leftist establishment in her religious faith. She stunned her own family in 1997 when she converted to evangelical Christianity, undergoing what she called a “mystical experience” while dealing with severe health problems related to her mercury poisoning. “The hardened Communist militant became a religious believer,” the journalist Marília de Camargo César wrote in Ms. Silva’s authorized biography. “Marina’s friends, even her own husband, turned up their nose when they learned the news.” In this year’s election, Ms. Silva has reached out to Brazil’s surging number of evangelicals, who account for about 22 percent of the population. But she has also come under criticism from opponents who say she would alter the secular underpinnings of government. Some have seized on reports that Ms. Silva practices “biblical roulette,” essentially opening the Bible to a random passage for inspiration during difficult decisions. Others have assailed Ms. Silva as a creationist, revealing the tensions over the influence of evangelical politicians and prompting rebukes by Ms. Silva. “I am not a creationist,” Ms. Silva has told a panel of Brazilian journalists. “But I don’t need to scientifically justify my faith. I believe that God created all things, including the great contribution given by Darwin.” Close associates of Ms. Silva have rushed to her defense. “It is absurd to think that Marina could put Brazil on a fundamentalist path,” said Valnice Milhomens, an evangelical leader. “Marina never even joined the evangelical bloc,” she added, referring to evangelical legislators in Congress who often veer to the right on social issues like abortion and same-sex marriage. This reluctance has exposed fissures in Ms. Silva’s campaign. After facing criticism from some evangelical leaders over her support for same-sex marriage, she backtracked this month, explaining that she supported civil unions instead. (The council overseeing Brazil’s judiciary has already opened the way for gay couples to marry.) Ms. Silva has not emphasized her ethnicity or humble origins much during the campaign. Instead, she has opted for a diffuse message of “new politics” needed to thwart the Workers Party and the centrist Brazilian Social Democracy Party, organizations that have dominated national politics for two decades. The strategy reflects the huge protests that shook Brazilian cities in 2013 and revealed broad loathing for a political system that lifted millions from poverty this century but also neglected festering problems like corruption and inadequate schools and hospitals. “Some things they got right, but they got a lot of other things wrong,” said William Souza, 42, an air-conditioning technician, referring to the Workers Party, in power since 2003. “Their time is up.” Now running under the much smaller Brazilian Socialist Party, Ms. Silva is known for having refused many of the perks enjoyed by Brazilian legislators when she was a senator for the Workers Party. She cultivates an asceticism contrasting with the opulent lifestyles of many prominent political leaders in Brazil. Her moderation goes beyond politics. Ms. Silva, the mother of four children, abstains from red meat, seafood, milk products and alcohol. She is known to abhor iced drinks and air-conditioning, literally making some people sweat when they meet with her. Big challenges to Ms. Silva’s candidacy persist. Ms. Rousseff’s campaign has a $55 million war chest, about five times what Ms. Silva has. Attack ads have already sowed some doubts about Ms. Silva, halting her rise in the polls. Ms. Silva has revealed little about how she would handle Brazil’s prominent diplomatic profile, largely avoiding issues like the close ties Ms. Rousseff’s government has maintained with Cuba and Venezuela. When Ms. Silva does pull back the curtain a bit, she occasionally reveals facets of a journey that millions of Brazilians find appealing. In a profile by the Brazilian magazine Piauí, she reflected on her toils as a maid. “Servants always remember the life of their masters,” Ms. Silva said. “The opposite is rarer to occur.” |