Brazilian politics: The body politic | The Economist

The body politic

Oct 31st 2011, 13:45 by J.P.

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LUIZ INÁCIO LULA DA SILVA, Brazil’s president from 2003 to 2010, begins chemotherapy to treat throat cancer today. As befits a city made by immigrants, he will be treated by a crack team from the Syrian-Lebanese hospital (São Paulo’s healthcare has its own, less destructive version of the Middle East conflict—the Syrian-Lebanese hospital vies for supremacy with the Israeli Albert Einstein hospital). It seems a bit crass to be talking about the politics of all this, but that’s what happens when the dominant political figure of the past decade, whom many expected to make a comeback at some point, gets sick. (We wish Lula a speedy recovery).

The reaction to Lula’s illness says two interesting things about Brazil today. The first concerns domestic politics. The current president, Dilma Rousseff, was considered by many to be a placeholder president, keeping the lights on at the Planalto palace until her former boss returned. Even before Lula got cancer that theory was looking shaky. Ms Rousseff has made a confident start as president, sacking ministers involved in corruption scandals and putting her own stamp on the government. That has endeared her to some of the middle-class urban voters who saw her predecessor as sitting at the top of a particularly rotten tree. In short, she looks like a president, rather than like someone pretending to be one for a while. Lula’s illness should put to rest any remaining doubts about whether Ms Rousseff is her own woman.

Second, the episode highlights the contrast between the two main strains of the Latin American left. Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez, who has sought to export his socialist “revolution” across the hemisphere, tried to hush up his cancer diagnosis earlier this year and has still not revealed any specifics about his condition. In Brazil, which has espoused a moderate and pluralist vision of the centre-left, the details of both Lula’s tumour and Ms Rousseff’s cancer of the lymph in 2009 were made public immediately. Hiding anything of this nature would be difficult in Brazil, thanks to its tenacious press.

Both these things reinforce that Brazilian politics has moved decisively away from the populism that many consider Latin America’s major innovation in politics. This bodes well for the country’s chances of handling the vast oil revenues that ought to come its way within the next decade. More on that in this week’s print edition.

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