Brian Winter
By Brian Winter
The turning point in President Dilma Rousseff’s re-election campaign came on the evening of September 1, after a disastrous presidential debate at which she confessed to the audience that she was “nervous” and stumbled over several words. A poll released that day showed she would lose by 10 percentage points in a runoff against environmentalist Marina Silva, with the election’s first round barely a month away.
Silva, meanwhile, was hammering Rousseff on two of her biggest weaknesses — Brazil’s stagnant economy, and her perceived inability to admit mistakes. “The way things were going, we believed we were going to lose,” one of Rousseff’s top aides told Reuters, speaking on condition of anonymity. “So that night, we decided to make a change.”
Their decision: To unleash a barrage of scathing TV ads and other attacks against Silva, the likes of which Brazil had arguably never seen before.
One ad, aired days later, showed bankers in suits laughing as food vanished from the plates of a working-class family — a dramatisation of what would supposedly happen if Silva’s proposal for central bank autonomy became law.
The negative tactics worked — and how.
Rousseff’s attacks wounded Silva so badly that her support melted away and she came third in the first round of voting, missing out on a runoff spot.
So Rousseff’s team then turned to her second-round opponent pro-business Senator Aecio Neves, and the same tactics helped the president to a narrow win on Sunday that gives her leftist Workers’ Party another four years in charge.
Rousseff won 51.6 percent of the vote, against 48.4 percent for Neves. She owed her victory to strong support from poorer voters, some of whom considered a change but ultimately heeded her repeated warnings that Neves “would take Brazil back to the past” and endanger cherished social welfare programmes.
Yet many believe Rousseff’s tough tactics will carry a cost.
By contributing to the end of a relatively collegial era in Brazilian politics, Rousseff will have to deal with a more bitterly divided Congress and electorate. That in turn will make it harder for her to manage an economy facing deep structural problems and a possible recession in 2015.
Her plans for a “political reform” that would ban corporate campaign donations, which she described in her victory speech on Sunday as a top priority, appear to be in danger.
It will also be harder to win back the confidence of bankers and business leaders, who themselves were dragged through the mud in the course of Rousseff’s attacks on Silva and then Neves. The coarsening tone has caught the eyes of investors, prompting bank Brown Brothers Harriman to warn clients last week that Brazil has joined countries like the United States, Thailand and Turkey as “a full member of the club of political polarisation.”
“It’s going to be a very difficult year,” said David Fleischer, a political analyst in Brasilia.
He said Rousseff came out of the election with a reputation as “the enemy of the private sector.”
A more fragmented Congress will likely resist her plans for political reform and may not even consent to hold a nationwide referendum on the proposal, as Rousseff has urged, Fleischer said.
For nearly two decades, Brazil enjoyed a certain degree of political consensus, thanks largely to the positive glow from a long economic boom that lifted some 40 million people out of poverty during the late 1990s and 2000s.
The Workers’ Party and PSDB, which governed from 1995 to 2002, embraced broadly the same center-left mix of robust welfare programmes and market-friendly policies.
But that began to change after Rousseff took office in 2011. Her more interventionist approach to economic policy, plus a slowdown in demand for Brazil’s commodities and continued fallout from the global financial crisis, has caused the economy to average less than 2 percent growth on her watch.
A career civil servant who remains uncomfortable with the darker side of politics in Brasilia, Rousseff initially resisted entreaties to go negative. The August 13 death in a plane crash of Eduardo Campos, then the third-place candidate, created an atmosphere of mourning around the campaign.
Campos was then replaced by Silva, who soared into first place in polls, buoyed in part by sympathy for the tragedy. Silva’s almost saintly image as a defender of the Amazon made Rousseff even more wary of going on the offensive.
But all that changed after September 1. Some of the most effective attacks implied that Silva would, if elected, cut back the so-called “Bolsa Familia” programme that pays a small monthly stipend to about one in four
Brazilians.
Silva tried to defend herself, arguing that anyone who suffered hunger as she did growing up would never curtail “Bolsa Familia.”
Yesterday morning, some Brazilian newspapers printed maps showing the country split into two nearly contiguous blocks of red and blue states that supported Rousseff and Neves, respectively — reminiscent of recent split election results in the United States, although the countries’ demographics differ.
Reuters
By Brian Winter
The turning point in President Dilma Rousseff’s re-election campaign came on the evening of September 1, after a disastrous presidential debate at which she confessed to the audience that she was “nervous” and stumbled over several words. A poll released that day showed she would lose by 10 percentage points in a runoff against environmentalist Marina Silva, with the election’s first round barely a month away.
Silva, meanwhile, was hammering Rousseff on two of her biggest weaknesses — Brazil’s stagnant economy, and her perceived inability to admit mistakes. “The way things were going, we believed we were going to lose,” one of Rousseff’s top aides told Reuters, speaking on condition of anonymity. “So that night, we decided to make a change.”
Their decision: To unleash a barrage of scathing TV ads and other attacks against Silva, the likes of which Brazil had arguably never seen before.
One ad, aired days later, showed bankers in suits laughing as food vanished from the plates of a working-class family — a dramatisation of what would supposedly happen if Silva’s proposal for central bank autonomy became law.
The negative tactics worked — and how.
Rousseff’s attacks wounded Silva so badly that her support melted away and she came third in the first round of voting, missing out on a runoff spot.
So Rousseff’s team then turned to her second-round opponent pro-business Senator Aecio Neves, and the same tactics helped the president to a narrow win on Sunday that gives her leftist Workers’ Party another four years in charge.
Rousseff won 51.6 percent of the vote, against 48.4 percent for Neves. She owed her victory to strong support from poorer voters, some of whom considered a change but ultimately heeded her repeated warnings that Neves “would take Brazil back to the past” and endanger cherished social welfare programmes.
Yet many believe Rousseff’s tough tactics will carry a cost.
By contributing to the end of a relatively collegial era in Brazilian politics, Rousseff will have to deal with a more bitterly divided Congress and electorate. That in turn will make it harder for her to manage an economy facing deep structural problems and a possible recession in 2015.
Her plans for a “political reform” that would ban corporate campaign donations, which she described in her victory speech on Sunday as a top priority, appear to be in danger.
It will also be harder to win back the confidence of bankers and business leaders, who themselves were dragged through the mud in the course of Rousseff’s attacks on Silva and then Neves. The coarsening tone has caught the eyes of investors, prompting bank Brown Brothers Harriman to warn clients last week that Brazil has joined countries like the United States, Thailand and Turkey as “a full member of the club of political polarisation.”
“It’s going to be a very difficult year,” said David Fleischer, a political analyst in Brasilia.
He said Rousseff came out of the election with a reputation as “the enemy of the private sector.”
A more fragmented Congress will likely resist her plans for political reform and may not even consent to hold a nationwide referendum on the proposal, as Rousseff has urged, Fleischer said.
For nearly two decades, Brazil enjoyed a certain degree of political consensus, thanks largely to the positive glow from a long economic boom that lifted some 40 million people out of poverty during the late 1990s and 2000s.
The Workers’ Party and PSDB, which governed from 1995 to 2002, embraced broadly the same center-left mix of robust welfare programmes and market-friendly policies.
But that began to change after Rousseff took office in 2011. Her more interventionist approach to economic policy, plus a slowdown in demand for Brazil’s commodities and continued fallout from the global financial crisis, has caused the economy to average less than 2 percent growth on her watch.
A career civil servant who remains uncomfortable with the darker side of politics in Brasilia, Rousseff initially resisted entreaties to go negative. The August 13 death in a plane crash of Eduardo Campos, then the third-place candidate, created an atmosphere of mourning around the campaign.
Campos was then replaced by Silva, who soared into first place in polls, buoyed in part by sympathy for the tragedy. Silva’s almost saintly image as a defender of the Amazon made Rousseff even more wary of going on the offensive.
But all that changed after September 1. Some of the most effective attacks implied that Silva would, if elected, cut back the so-called “Bolsa Familia” programme that pays a small monthly stipend to about one in four
Brazilians.
Silva tried to defend herself, arguing that anyone who suffered hunger as she did growing up would never curtail “Bolsa Familia.”
Yesterday morning, some Brazilian newspapers printed maps showing the country split into two nearly contiguous blocks of red and blue states that supported Rousseff and Neves, respectively — reminiscent of recent split election results in the United States, although the countries’ demographics differ.
Reuters
