Brazil’s Environmentalist Candidate Faces Uphill Presidential Race

The Economist has a long, in-depth interview with former senator and environmental minister Marina Silva, who left the ruling Workers’ Party and ran for president in 2010 as a Green Party candidate. This time around she hopes to challenge President Dilma Rousseff’s reelection bid under the banner of a new political movement, called the Sustainability Network.

The October 5 deadline for her new party to submit the necessary signatures to participate in next year’s election is fast approaching, however. And while she has sent 900,000 signatures to election authorities, only about half have been approved, leaving her short of the 492,000 required. Silva claims that an unusually high number of signatures were rejected by notaries in Workers' Party strongholds, saying "obviously there was something happening on the notaries' side that the electoral courts will have to judge."

Perhaps the most interesting element of the interview involves Silva’s campaign platform. While she has long been seen as a kind of moral authority on environmental policy in the country, Silva has also embraced transparency and improved political representation, issues which may resonate greatly among Brazilians in the wake of last June’s wave of demonstrations.  Some highlights of the interview:

[If] you govern according to a programme, and you have a strategic agenda, you can't ignore society in implementing that agenda. You can't think that this is something you can "do to" society without having created that agenda together with society. The big problem we are facing right now is that there is a complete separation between a society that wants a better Brazil, and politicians who imagine that it is their prerogative to do things for society in whatever way they want. That they can, in their position of representatives, replace the represented. Representative democracy doesn't mean excluding the voices of those who are represented. 

.… 

But corruption will only be cut when tackling it stops being seen as the government's responsibility and starts being seen as society's. It was only when slavery was seen as a societal issue and not an issue for government, that it was ended. It was the same with Brazil's dictatorship, and then economic instability, and after that dire poverty: these were finally dealt with once they stopped being seen as issues for government to resolve and were adopted by society. It will be the same with corruption, and it has already started. Those who think that things will just return to normal are fooling themselves. It'll never be the same after the protests.

Despite Silva’s appeal to the messages which led over a million Brazilians to participate in demonstrations earlier this year, public opinion polls suggest she has a difficult campaign ahead even if  her party gets approved. Although a July poll placed her just eight points behind Rousseff (22 to 30 percent approval, respectively), a survey published last Thursday shows that the president has made a rebound in public opinion. She remains the second most popular candidate in the running, but the Ibope poll shows that the gap between her and Rousseff has more than doubled. Silva is now trailing the president by 22 points, with 16 percent support compared to 38 percent.

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