Brazil´s Elections

October 3, 2006
News Analysis
In Brazil Balloting, Leader Finds His Base May Turn to Sand
By LARRY ROHTER
RIO DE JANEIRO, Oct. 2 — Until the very end, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil was predicting victory in the first round in his campaign for re-election.
He was wrong, and now he faces what promises to be the most draining, potentially dangerous campaign of his long career, against an opponent he and many others had discounted.
Mr. da Silva, a 60-year-old former factory worker and labor leader who has been beleaguered by one scandal after another for nearly two years, polled 48.65 percent of the vote in the presidential election on Sunday, short of the majority he needed to avoid a runoff on Oct. 29.
That outcome assured a second chance for Geraldo Alckmin of the Brazilian Social Democratic Party, who won 41.6 percent of the vote.
“This is going to be an interesting second round — clarifying, I hope,” a chastened Mr. da Silva said Monday afternoon at a news conference in Brasília. “I have to convince the people.”
Mr. da Silva had appeared to be on his way to a resounding victory until mid-September, when the police caught operatives of his leftist Workers Party trying to buy a contrived dossier they apparently thought would incriminate Mr. Alckmin’s party in a kickback scandal. That skullduggery, which Mr. da Silva says supporters carried out without his approval or knowledge, put him on the defensive, where he remains.
“This second round is starting with Lula declining and Alckmin rising, which could lead to even more surprises if it continues,” said Rubens Figueiredo, a political analyst and consultant in São Paulo. “Public opinion has shifted in a short time because of the dossier case, which still hasn’t run its course.”
As a result, the second round that Mr. da Silva neither wanted nor expected promises to be extraordinarily hard-fought and full of contrasts. The differences are not so much of ideas — both parties have been fighting for the same space left of center since Mr. da Silva tacked toward the center in order to win in 2002 — but of personality and political style.
Mr. da Silva, who has been a candidate in all five of Brazil’s presidential elections since a military dictatorship ended in 1985, is excitable, voluble and charismatic, the poor peasant lad who has made good and wants everyone to know it.
Mr. Alckmin, a mild-mannered 53-year-old anesthesiologist, is none of that, which was originally considered a liability but now looks attractive to voters who say they yearn for honesty and competence.
“Put a cassock on Alckmin and he’d look just like a priest from a small-town parish,” said Jairo Nicolau, a political science professor at Candido Mendes University, in Rio de Janeiro.
“Or to put it another way, he talks like that brilliant but boring professor that everyone remembers from school, the kind of guy who knows the price of a square meter of asphalt and really likes the details of administration.”
This is the third time that Mr. da Silva is competing in a second round, but the first time as the incumbent. In contrast with the outcome in 2002, when he won nearly everywhere and ended up with more than 60 percent of the vote, he faces a situation in which 11 of the country’s 27 states voted in favor of his rival in the first round, including all the states in the industrialized, more prosperous south.
The most unpredictable factor in the vote, however, is what Tereza Cruvinel, a columnist for the daily O Globo, calls “the police dimension” of the campaign. The federal police are still investigating the case, and every day seems to bring another round of headlines that further incriminate operatives of Mr. da Silva’s party and damage his image.
“The longer this drags on, the more the opposition has a banner to exploit,” Mr. Nicolau said. “Lula needs to bring the campaign to his strong area, what he has achieved, and he can’t do that right now. This needs to be resolved as quickly as possible, because if it goes on for another 10 or 15 days, it is going to be devastating for him, or even lethal.”
Mr. Alckmin knows that, and has already begun hammering away at Mr. da Silva and his entourage, saying his own victory would mean “ethics defeating corruption.” In an interview published Monday, he also insinuated that a cover-up was under way to protect Mr. da Silva and others close to him until after the election.
“The problem is not just the purchase of the dossier, which is itself extremely grave,” Mr. Alckmin said in the interview, in O Estado de São Paulo. “It is lamentable that 15 days later, the origins of the money, the origins of the dollars, the holders of the bank accounts are not known. Nothing has been explained.”
The image of piles of neatly wrapped American dollars and Brazilian reals stacked on a table, published in newspapers one day before the vote, resonated powerfully throughout Brazil.
As one newspaper columnist pointed out, the $792,000 involved would be enough to feed for a month 28,000 of the families enrolled in the Family Allowance program, the backbone of Mr. da Silva’s efforts to aid the poor.
“If the electoral tribunal permits it, you’re going to see that image over and over again in Alckmin’s television advertisements,” said Mr. Figueiredo, the political analyst.
Mr. da Silva’s campaign advisers say they hope to shift the focus away from the dossier, which the president compared in his news conference on Monday to shooting himself in the foot. They want to focus on the economy, which is stable, if growing slowly; inflation, which has been contained; the minimum wage, which has risen, and social welfare programs like the Family Allowance.
“The president’s orientation is to continue showing what we’ve done and to compare that with the previous government,” Tarso Genro, one of the few remaining close advisers to Mr. da Silva who has not been forced to resign, indicted, expelled from Congress or investigated by the police, told reporters in Brasília on Sunday night. “There’s going to be a lot of debate now that it’s not an unequal debate of three against one.”
At the last minute, Mr. da Silva pulled out of a debate with his three main opponents last week.
This time, though, Mr. da Silva has to take part in debates, “no matter what the dangers,” Mr. Figueiredo said. “The risks are higher for him and the situation favors Alckmin, because he’s not carrying the ethical burden that Lula is, but Lula has to show he does not disrespect voters.”