This week I found myself crisscrossing Brazil with stops in Belo Horizonte, Curitiba and Brazilia. The tragic death of Presidential candidate Eduardo Campos has opened the way for his running mate, Marina Silva to lead the ticket for Brazil’s Socialist Party.
Marina, as everyone in Brazil calls her, who once ran under the green party ticket, only joined the PSB because her team had not managed to get her on the ballot in time but has, in two weeks, emerged as the front runner in the election which is scheduled for October 5th.
Besides Marina and Brazil’s current president, Dilma Rousseff, there are an additional 9 candidates in the race including Aecio Neves who was in line to be in second place until the irruption of Ms. Silva last week. Brazil’s electoral system calls for a second round election on October 29th if the leading candidate does not get a clear majority so the thinking is that whoever takes second place has a chance to win if they can unite the opposition.
The most recent polls have Ms. Silva tied with Dilma Rousseff in the first round and winning the second!
A Green Agenda
While the election is mostly about the economy which has slowed down and the perceived waste associated with the world cup (which Brazil of course didn’t win!) Ms. SIlva brings an interesting mix of environmentalism coupled with a deep faith as an evangelical Christian.
Brazil faces huge environmental challenges including deforestation, energy shortages due to lack of rain to drive its hydroelectric infrastructure, devastating traffic and air pollution in the cities and tremendous social inequality.
Marina, who was Minister for the Environment from 2003 to 2008 under president Lula da Silva, can be compared to Barak Obama as an unlikely Presidential candidate as she was born in a poor family in the North of the country and has also sparked a wave of support which the country has not seen since Lula da Silva’s election in 2003.
A graduate of IESE’s AMP in Media & Entertainment, Leonardo Petrelli, who owns a media business with TV, Radio and Press in the southern part of the country, is convinced that “Marina will be the next president of Brazil” and thinks that Dilma Rousseff might not even make it to the second round.
The Challenge of Governing
Her challenge, according to Petrelli, is that she has very little political organization and it is unclear to what extent the party she nominally heads will actually support her legislative agenda in the Brazilian Congress and Senate.
While the consensus appears to be that Mr. Neves is out of the race, Fernando Henrique Cordoso, who holds great influence in Neves’ party has been saying positive things about Marina and perhaps will offer the party’s support if she tempers her green agenda.
Brazil has entered into recession and needs economic stimulus and jobs of the kind provided by Anglo American’s giant Minas Rio mining project (about which we are writing a case study) and Marina must figure out how to convince Brazil’s economic elite that sustainability make good business strategy.
Sustainability makes for the only good business strategy that will not destroy the country in the long term. It’s already evident how greedy economy and disregard for the human rights and the environment has done to Brazil. It’s how to recover. And recovery is almost never the result of repeating the same one – two punch until it works.
Brazil seems (at least for an outsider’s eyes) like more than one country on the same land. The unbalanced social groups lead to debilitating in communication and thus making a “good for everybody” strategy is something I don’t see coming.