Though young, energetic and telegenic Eduardo Campos had posed little threat to the re-election bid of Brazil's president Dilma Rousseff.
Once an ally of her ruling Workers Party, the former socialist governor was a distant third in polls and considered a more realistic contender for the 2018 race.
But then on August 13th he was killed when his private jet crashed in the port city of Santos. Though he was polling in the single digits at the time of the tragedy, his death has transformed Brazil’s presidential race.
In part this is due to a wave of public sympathy for Mr Campos which his family and colleagues have channelled into support for his Socialist Party. But mainly it is because his running mate was Marina Silva who has now stepped into the race in his place.
She is an altogether more formidable opponent for the president than Mr Campos ever was. A former housemaid from the jungle state of Acre, who educated herself out of poverty, Ms Silva has a personal biography to rival that of the hugely popular Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the shoeshine boy turned (former) president whom she served as environment minister.
She won 20 million votes when placing third in the 2010 election that elevated Ms Rousseff to the presidency and was the only national politician to see her approval rating increase during the huge street protests in June last year.
Popularity decline
That sudden eruption of popular discontent highlighted deep-seated anger with Brazilian politics-as-usual. In a presidential system this was particularly damaging for the incumbent. Ms Rousseff’s approval rating plummeted during the protests and has never fully recovered. Today a third of voters say they would not vote for her under any circumstances.
But neither Mr Campos nor the main opposition candidate Aécio Neves, of the centre-right Social Democrats, two orthodox politicians born into political dynasties, were able to capitalise on the president’s declining fortunes.
But now, over a year after the protests petered out, Ms Silva has, thanks to the tragedy in Santos, found herself in a position to do so. Though she lacks Lula’s personal charisma she has nonetheless, like him, been able to articulate a vision of a more just society that resonates widely in a way that none of the other candidates have managed so far.
She is promising to implement a vague, somewhat utopian “new politics” that would end the rampant corruption that has continued to flourish under the Workers Party and implement more environmentally sustainable growth policies.
The absence of any convincing explanation of how she would implement these, with no meaningful base in congress, has not stopped her pulling alongside the president in opinion polls ahead of the October 5th vote while also showing she would beat her in a run-off three weeks later.
She already looks to have knocked Mr Neves out of contention. As Ms Silva has emerged as the more viable contender to Resident Rousseff many of his voters are switching to her as the best way to kick the Workers Party out. His poll numbers have dropped as hers have risen and his advisers are already talking of endorsing Ms Silva in a run-off.
Terrible communicator
Despite the anti-incumbency mood, the Workers Party can claim many achievements during its 12 years in power. But its efforts to highlight these are being undermined by two factors. First Ms Rousseff is a terrible communicator. In debates she comes across as aggressive and impatient, a grumpy technocrat spewing reams of statistics about her government’s successes without connecting these to the lives of ordinary people.
More worryingly, the president has throttled the economic boom she inherited from Lula. Ms Rousseff blames this on external forces but this does not explain why Brazil is underperforming its neighbours and is in recession.
Though employment and wages are holding up for now, the contraction could not come at a worse time for Ms Rousseff. According to the UN, economic growth was responsible for most of the reduction in poverty that took place on the Workers Party’s watch. Attempts to highlight past achievements, most of them from Lula’s eight years in office rather than her own, have less purchase as increasing numbers of voters worry Ms Rousseff cannot deliver more of the growth that made them possible.
With just a month of campaigning left, the president’s struggling campaign has turned negative and launched a series of attack ads targeting Ms Silva. The tactic could well work. Lula was the target of relentless negative campaigning that contributed to his three election defeats. He eventually won power at the fourth in 2002 with the slogan, “Hope Will Conquer Fear.” Little signifies how far his Workers Party has come since its reliance on fear to stay in office.
