Brazil caught up in a green tsunami

y GWYNNE DYER, QMI Agency

http://www.torontosun.com/

This is now the great mystery of Brazilian politics: What will Marina do? Marina is Marina Silva, leader of Brazil’s Green Party, and the speaker, Altino Machado, is a journalist and one of her oldest friends. But Marina has already done something remarkable: She persuaded one-fifth of Brazil’s voters to support the Green Party.

Twenty percent is the second-highest share of the vote ever won by any Green Party anywhere, and Brazil, with more than 200 million people, is the country that really counts in South America.

What happened there was, said the Rio newspaper O Dia, a green tsunami.

The votes that went to Marina deprived Workers Party candidate Dilma Roussef of victory in the first round of voting on Oct. 4.

To win in the first round, a candidate must get 50% of the vote; Dilma ended up with 46.9%. So now Marina must decide whether to support Dilma in the second round on Oct. 31, or back the relatively conservative runner-up in the first round, Jose Serra.

However, her decision matters less than it seems: Dilma only needs a few million extra votes to cross the 50% barrier, and Marina cannot really compel all the Greens to vote for Serra.

The headline story is still the rapid economic growth Brazil has enjoyed under outgoing president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and, just as importantly, the way the new wealth has been shared out.

Fifty million Brazilians have been rescued from poverty (an income of less than $82 per month) by Lulas subsidies for the very poor, and another 25 million Brazilians have actually ascended into the middle class. So Lula leaves office after eight years with a stratospheric approval rating of 80%.

He could choose a complete nobody as his successor and get him or her elected. Dilma Roussef is more than that a former guerrilla during the military dictatorship of 1964-85, a skilled administrator, and Lula’s former chief of staff but nobody has ever said she had too much charisma.

No matter. She’ll win the second round anyway. What’s really interesting here is the emergence, two decades after the restoration of democracy, of what you might call Brazil’s political personality.

All three big political parties, the Workers Party, Serras Social Democrats, and the Greens, are on the left economically, and they all promise to continue Lula’s brand of pragmatic socialism. Together, they got 98% of the vote in the elections on Oct. 4.

The rapid rise of the Greens is partly driven by Brazilians growing awareness that they are the custodians of the world’s largest tropical forest, the Amazon.

That may explain why 85% of Brazilians think that climate change is a major problem, while only 37% of Americans do.

Brazil is the only one of the BRICs, the big countries with high economic growth rates, to have both a powerful industrial sector and self-sufficiency in energy.

By the time it hosts the Olympic Games in 2016, it will probably have the fifth-largest economy in the world.

It is still one of the world’s most unequal countries, with a gulf between rich and poor that makes even the United States look egalitarian.

But it is moving in a different direction now, without the doctrinaire excesses that usually mar such efforts.

Brazil is becoming not just an important place, but a very interesting place.

— Gwynne Dyer’s new book, Climate Wars, was published in Canada by Random House.

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