ONE OF Brazil’s leading environmental campaigners has quit the ruling Workers Party for the Green Party and is expected to announce shortly that she will stand as its candidate in next year’s presidential elections.
Senator Marina Silva was President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s pick for environment minister on coming to power in 2003, a move that raised hopes that Brazil’s first left-wing government would seriously tackle the issue of deforestation in the Amazon rainforest.
During her 5½ years in government, the former rubber tapper from the jungle state of Acre oversaw a major overhaul of the country’s environmental protection agency.
However, despite being one of its most popular figures with the public, Ms Silva grew increasingly isolated within the government, irking President Lula with criticism of his beloved biofuels programme.
She also increasingly clashed with the government’s powerful so-called “developmentalist” wing, which resented her ministry’s delay in issuing environmental permits for large infrastructure projects in the Amazon, designed to speed up economic growth in one of Brazil’s poorest regions.
Ms Silva eventually quit the government in May 2008 after she was not given control over the government’s flagship sustainable Amazon plan.
Announcing her switch of allegiance to the Green Party on Wednesday, she said the political conditions were lacking “to lodge the environmental question in the heart of the government and the whole of public policy”.
She said it was time to give up trying to sway the Workers Party over to her point of view and instead work with other groups to bring about “the change of values and paradigms which will signal a new pattern of development for the country”.
In an attempt to convince her to switch allegiance, the Green Party commissioned opinion polls that showed Ms Silva at 15 per cent support for the presidency despite not even being a declared candidate, although other polls show her with significantly less support.
Ms Silva’s almost certain entry into the presidential race complicates the plans of President Lula to have his chief-of-staff, Dilma Rousseff, succeed him.
The president had hoped that Ms Rousseff would run as the only left-wing candidate, but now she will have to battle for the left-wing vote not only with Ms Silva, who is hugely popular with many of the rural social organisations affiliated with the Workers Party, but also with Heloísa Helena, the leader of a radical party made up of Workers Party dissidents.
“There is no guarantee that Marina’s candidacy will work,” says Luciano Dias, a political analyst in Brasília. “That will depend on how she is marketed and what political alliances she makes.
“But it is a worrying development for President Lula. It signals the loss of control over the left wing vote by the Workers Party.
“To win, Dilma will need this vote which in Brazil is historically about 20 to 25 per cent but now polls show Heloísa Helena with 12 per cent and Marina Silva with 5 per cent of voter intentions, and this will weaken Dilma.”