Strange as it may seem the protest vote is not with Dilma Roussef, Brazil's former guerilla president. She may have inherited the mantle of the Workers Party (PT) and her much-loved predecessor Luiz Inácio "Lula" da Silva. And with it, credit for the extraordinary transformation of Brazil that has seen in the PT's 12-year rule more than half its people rise into a new middle class. That has extended to 14 million families – a quarter of the country's 200 million people – the Bolsa Família, a monthly stipend of $125. That has brought about a decline in poverty from more than 16 per cent of the population in 2007 to 9 per cent in 2012. That has created 22 million new jobs, 11 million of them since the 2008 global crash.
But this month’s election is not in the bag. “Dilma” is now the “establishment” against whom millions protested over state World Cup extravagance last year. The newly empowered lower middle class is browned off with creaking and in many cases decrepit state services, schools, hospitals, transport, with the still endemic corruption her party is enmired in, and the disappearing growth that seems to suggest the clock will be rolled back. The economy was in technical recession in the first half and Brazil’s fiscal balance is deteriorating.
In steps Marina Silva, charismatic environmental campaigner, one-time PT minister, and now presidential candidate of the opposition Socialist Party by virtue of her running mate's accidental death. Raised as an illiterate rubber tapper, this former housemaid of part-African descent, has surged past Dilma in the polls though the latter has clawed her way back – 41 per cent each in a polll last week.
Silva promises to combine the PT’s social model with the fiscal responsibility of a previous government – triangulation, Tony Blair would call it. There will be no “economic adventurism”. No cuts, and balanced budgets... Whether such a reconciliation is possible hardly matters, Silva has shocked by turning the election in the world’s seventh economy into the closest contest in a generation.