Wilson Center's Brazil Institute Head Paulo Sotero: International Leadership to Be Major Challenge for Dilma Rousseff as President of Brazil

Interview |Author: Ivan Dikov | November 1, 2010, Monday // 03:26|  views

Photo by iamericas.org

Exclusive interview of Novinite.com (Sofia News Agency) with Professor Paulo Sotero, Director of the Brazil Institute of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Washington, DC, on the Presidential Elections in Brazil won by Bulgaria-descended Dilma Rousseff. By Ivan Dikov

 

How would you characterize in general the presidential race in Brazil between Dilma Rousseff and Jose Serra? It seems that they have both had ups and downs. What do you think are the specific reasons for those?

Initially, Jose Serra, the opposition candidate, led the race until about July 2010 because he was better known by the Brazilian public. He had already run for the presidency. He was a very popular, successful man, minister of health, governor of the state of Sao Paulo, mayor of the city of Sao Paulo, which is the largest city and state in Brazil. He was very known.

Dilma Rousseff at that time was chief of staff for the president but she was not a very well known person nationally. She held a position, inside the government, an important one but a management position, and she had never run for office.

Once she resigned her position to run, as required by Brazilian law, she became more known, and people started to identify her as the candidate of President Lula, she started going up in the polls.

Why? Because president Lula is a very successful politician. He is a well-regarded president, his popularity is in the 80% range, and once the electorate in Brazil made the connection between him, and Dilma Rousseff as the chosen candidate of President Lula, it became evident that she would emerge as a very powerful candidate. She demonstrated that she basically ran on the popularity and support of president Lula.

How would you describe Dilma Rousseff as a politician and as a presidential candidate?

She is very likely to win the election, the latest poll is that she is more than 10-15 points ahead. We never know about polls they might be mistaken but it will be absolutely huge surprise if she doesn't become the next president of Brazil.

Dilma Rousseff has been underestimated by her main opponent Jose Serra, a very experienced politician, and she almost won the elections in the first round on October 3.

She was denied that victory only because of the very strong performance of another candidate – former minister of the environment Marina Silva, who got almost 20% of the vote, and forced a a second round.

In Brazil, to win the presidency you need 50% plus 1 vote of the valid votes. Dilma was not particularly counting on a second round but during the campaign she stood her ground, and the expectation of the other candidate Jose Serra that her lack of experience as a politician would damage her did not materialize.

She continued to run as the candidate for continuity. Brazilians want continuity, and she again renewed her promises for continuity, and resolved some difficulties for her created, for instance, by her position on the abortion issue.

At some point, she stated she was in favor, as is the official position of the Workers' Party since 2001, of decriminalizing abortion in Brazil.

Abortion in Brazil is illegal, and is permitted legally only in case of rape, or of danger for the life of the mother. But Dilma Rousseff explained, or changed her position, saying that she would respect the current law.

She has also been threatened by allegations of corruption in the Lula government, which has been a constant problem for her campaign. But she has been able to distance herself from that, and from the person accused of involvement in one of the scandals. That is one that involves the person that replaced her as the chief of staff. Dilma was able to convince the voters in Brazil that she was not involved in the wrongdoing committed by that woman.

Dilma Rousseff has overall performed quite competently as a candidate, although the campaign has failed to address the major challenges that Brazil faces.

Even though Brazil is in a good position, it is living a good moment of economic growth, and there has been some redistribution of income, and an expansion of the middle class, there are some major challenges ahead of us, and unfortunately, the campaign for the second round, in the last four weeks, did not produce the type of debate among the two candidates that would probably have helped the public focus on these challenges.

What are these challenges for Brazil that you are talking about?

There are two major challenges. One has to do with the improvement of the physical capital and infrastructure of the country – airports, ports, highways, railways.

Brazil is a country that has a booming economy but has major problems with transportation, ports that are inefficient, and mass transit in cities.

A country that has the ambition of being one of the largest, most modern countries, you know, a growing economy, has to address this problem with the physical infrastructure.

The other equally or even more important issue is the human capital problem. Brazil has a huge education problem. Half of the adolescents in Brazil are not in high school. At age 15, 55% of the Brazilian youngsters can read only mechanically, they cannot interpret a text.

The education system, the number of years people spent in schools, is 8-9 on average when it should be 12, obviously.

There is a huge challenge for Brazil to better educate its own population, and you can see the problems manifest themselves in situations as the one we have right now where companies in Brazil need desperately qualified workers.

There is always a deficit in Brazil of 100 000-130 000 skilled workers; those jobs are not filled simply because we don't have that human capital, we don't have the people. The schools in Brazil fail to produce enough skilled workers.

And if you think of a country that has all the ambitious projects that we have – for instance, to explore the oil found off-shore in the last few years, if you think about the challenge that we have of getting Brazil ready to receive tens of thousands of tourists for the World Cup in 2014, or the Olympics in 2016, you can see the need we have to improve our infrastructure in order to become more competitive. All of those things are crucial challenges on the domestic front.

The general opinion is that Brazil is well on the way of becoming a global power. What would a Brazil with Dilma Rousseff as President look like internationally?

You can project abroad only what you are inside. I think Dilma Rousseff understands that very well, and during the campaign she talked about the importance of dealing with infrastructure and education.

There are other things we need to deal with such as our tax system that is very regressive, and there are indications that she will tackle this, using the mandate that she will gain.

Brazil has emerged in the last few years, as a very important player internationally and Dilma Rousseff will have the challenge of continuing to exercise leadership internationally.

She will probably have a harder time doing that than both President Lula and Lula's predecessor, Fernando Henrique Cardoso. Those were people that were sort-of naturally inclined to exercise that kind of leadership. They are very comfortable doing that, they understood very well the importance of exercising global leadership and they knew how to do it.

So Dilma Rousseff will have to demonstrate that she also has that talent and capacity because she basically managed the government in Brazil for the last five years or so.

But going back to the domestic front, her main challenge as president will be the challenge of every president in Brazil – which is – to organize, form, and manage a very heterogeneous presidential coalition that will support her policies.

She will have a very comfortable majority. The parties that support her will have a very comfortable majority in Congress but this does not assure her that she will be able to pass every piece of legislation that she wants to pass.

Why? Because the coalition that will supports her has people from one or two communist parties that we have in Brazil to evangelicals. They are very heterogeneous ideologically and they decide on their positions depending on the issues, ad hoc.

They may be with the president on one issue, and not agree on another issue. Her job will be to try to gain support from this coalition in Congress for her position, in order to do, for instance, a revision of the tax code in Brazil that is very cumbersome, and helps make Brazil less competitive than it would be with a more efficient tax system. So those are domestic challenges.

But internationally she will have challenges as well. For example, Lula is a leader very well known in the region, he is an international star.

Dilma is not. Her inclination will probably be to have a quieter kind of foreign policy, less visible, less protagonistic, as we say in Brazil, which will be probably more in line with the Brazilian temperament.

But at the same time she will not have the luxury of not being interested in foreign affairs because Brazil has important interests abroad. She will be challenged to lead Brazil in negotiations from the G-20 to the Doha and the WTO, from issues regarding international security to climate change, biodiversity. In all those areas, Brazil is now actor, a participant.

The same goes for the region, where we are now bigger – the Brazilian economy is approximately 60% of South America's economy, and over 40% of the Latin American economy. This obviously creates expectations for Brazil on part of the neighbors, and it is the task of Brazil to lead a foreign policy in dialogue with the immediate neighbors, as well as with other countries, for instance, from China to the USA, traditional important partners, to countries in Europe.

For instance, she will be challenged to have a deep relationship between Brazil and Africa that President Lula started not only because he is right to believe that Brazil has a history back with Africa since there were more slaves from Africa in colonial times sent to Brazil than to any other country in the world, almost 4 million, but also because Africa is increasingly important economically for Brazilian engineering companies that are now having contracts and projects there.

In different areas Brazil will continue to be challenged to occupy positions of international leadership, and Dilma Rousseff will have to show that she has the talent and disposition to do that.

In the case of President Fernando Henrique Cardozo and Lula these responsibilities came naturally to them because they are each in his own way charismatic figures. They have a public persona that people welcome.

Dilma Rousseff has a more quieter and reserved temperament and she is not known as a person that will go out like President Lula. She is not a "people's person" but she will now occupy a position as President of an emerging power that will require her to fulfill those duties. To show that she is capable. She has very big shoes to fill.

Generally speaking, should Brazil be expected to side more with the so called Western democracies or more with the emerging economies such as the BRIC countries?

I think that Brazil has to do both at the same time, and I believe that Dilma Rousseff understands that. Brazil cannot afford to have relationships just with the BRIC countries in detriment to its ties with other countries, such as its neighbors or the countries in Africa.

Brazil cannot afford not to have good relations with the United States and Canada and Europe because those are important markets for the Brazilian products. Obviously, the USA is now experiencing a very difficult economic moment like Europe, so it's not the most dynamic market of this point.

Actually, Brazil is becoming increasingly important for the USA as a market because we are the growing market. I think we are one of the few countries, if not the only one, where the USA managed to have a trade surplus in the first half of 2010. But that's a choice.

Brazil cannot afford not to emphasize relations with China, which are very important. China is the largest trading partner for Brazil but Brazil basically exports agricultural commodities to China, things with low added value. In contrast, we export more industrial products to the USA and to our neighbors in the Americas.

This is an important consideration strategically because it is not in the long-term interest of Brazil to be a major supplier of raw materials to China and to buy from them the finished product. Brazil has to add value to its produce.

So some people have complained that the economic relationship between Brazil and China risks to become a kind of neocolonial relationship and it's not in our best interest. Again, you cannot ignore China, nobody can, but the way you approach China is a challenge because of what I just mentioned.

I believe that Dilma Rousseff, having had dealings as Chief of Staff with the USA and Europe, etc, probably will look for a balanced interaction to really emphasize the fact that Brazil is a global nation, our trade is more or less evenly distributed with the different regions of the world, and Brazil obviously has to act very carefully.

There are situations in which Brazil may have to side more with one side than the other. For instance, take the currency situation, the competitive devaluations that the countries are doing, etc.

In the currency issue vis-a-vis China, Brazil and the USA have similar interest, which is to convince China to stop this policy of having a undervalued currency that helps their trade but hurts ours. Again, I think the mission of the president will be to identify the Brazilian interest in every moment, and respond to that, and I have no doubt that Dilma Rosuseff understands that perfectly.

Brazil is an immigrant society but do you think the awareness of Dilma Rousseff's Bulgarian origin has come to play any role at all about her image or campaign. A Brazilian TV channel talked about Bulgaria describing as the poorest and most corrupt EU country, linking that to Dilma Rousseff?

Dilma has occasionally talked about Bulgaria as the home country of her father and she talked about Bulgaria with respect and affection. I believe that as president she will be interested in Bulgaria particularly because there is this historic tie.

Because of her family heritage, she will have the opportunity to establish a relationship with Bulgaria, and probably after a few years, the Brazilians will learn more about the people in Bulgaria, and the people in Bulgaria will start learning more about Brazil and maybe we will have more businesses and tourists visiting both countries because we all know there are parts of Bulgaria that are very beautiful.

Having a president that is the daughter of an immigrant - Brazil is a country of immigrants - is in my view is a very positive thing, and her election will obviously be an opportunity for her to engage with Bulgaria and for both countries to develop a better knowledge and better relationships that are mutually advantageous.

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Tags: Paulo Sotero, Brazil Institute, Wilson Center, Bulgarian immigrants, Workers' Party, Lula, Presidential elections, Petar Rusev, Brazilian, Brazil, Dilma Rousseff, China, BRIC, USA

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