Lula's enthusiastic supporters have yet to warm to his chosen successor, writes TOM HENNIGAN
ON THE grim northern fringe of São Paulo, Brasilândia is the sort of poor neighbourhood that has benefited greatly from the economic boom Brazil has enjoyed during the presidency of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
And on Sunday it was where a colleague and I expected to find most voters heeding his call to support his anointed successor, Dilma Rousseff.
People we spoke to were very happy with Lula’s government and many said they’d vote for him again in a heartbeat. But the hard part was finding those obeying his call to vote for his former cabinet chief.
Instead we were constantly listening to why people were opting for the third party candidate, Marina Silva of the Greens.
One polling booth in a country of 136 million voters is hardly a scientific survey but after almost two hours my tally had Ms Silva on 70 per cent. Nationally she took almost 20, still a major surprise and enough to deny Ms Rousseff first round victory.
One couple said they were attracted by Ms Silva’s call for more environmentally sustainable growth in the future, pointing at a pile of rubbish dumped across the street. Many young people mentioned her proposal to hike the amount of GDP spending on a disastrous public education system. Others simply said the country needed a change from the Workers Party-Social Democrat duopoly that dominated the four previous presidential races.
A common complaint was that Ms Rousseff lacked a political “past” like Ms Silva and Lula. A career administrator fighting her first ever election, she has instead relied on Lula’s strong backing.
That backing still makes her favourite for the run-off but she has performed more weakly than expected in regions where Lula is wildly popular. “Dilma is just an intellectual who did nothing for us. Lula supports her, but Marina is also Workers Party.
“She thinks differently from the others, more about the environment. She is the future, the other two are just more of the same,” says Liliana Francisco Inácio.
The question now is where Ms Silva’s votes will go. Her political roots are in the Workers Party but she quit Lula’s government in 2008 and the Workers Party in 2009 partly because of disagreements in cabinet with Ms Rousseff, who was a prominent critic of her management of the environment ministry under Lula.
A possible scenario is that the Greens will endorse Mr Serra while Ms Silva will remain neutral. A promise of neutrality would almost certainly be enough for Ms Rousseff and would also help preserve Ms Silva’s independence for future contests. She is only 52 and her showing on Sunday could be a springboard to an even greater political future.
As the daughter of Amazonian rubber tappers who learned to read at 16 and worked as a maid before going to university she has a biography that rivals that of Lula.
As one of the country’s first environmental campaigners she also has a political trajectory with far greater appeal than those of the technocrats who now dominate both the Workers Party and the Social Democrats. And having campaigned for him since the return of democracy Ms Silva will also be keenly aware that Lula had to fight and lose three campaigns before finally becoming president.