Lula proves hard act to follow on political stage

In the crush of people pushing their way to join the 35,000 in the main square of Porto Alegre, southern Brazil, shouts rise above the noise of fireworks, music and glaringly amplified speeches: “I want to see Dilma!” and the rejoinder, “I want to see Lula!”

President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and his chosen successor, Dilma Rousseff, are the headline acts in a rousing campaign rally – one of the last before Brazil’s elections this Sunday – that at one point has the crowd in Ms Rousseff’s home town, the capital of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil’s southernmost state, giving a stirring, word-perfect rendition of the state’s anthem.

Yet when Ms Rousseff finally takes the stage before the patriotic multitude, it is to a surprisingly muted reception. She gets most applause for comments on the $67bn share issue by Petrobras, the national oil company, announced officially that morning, which she compares with the $4bn sale of Petrobras shares by the previous, centrist government in 2000. “Did we sell any part of Petrobras to get [the $67bn]? No! Today we bought back what had been sold, for Brazil, for the Brazilian people!”

Only when she passes the microphone to President Lula himself does the crowd go wild. He has to wait for shouts of “Lula! Lula!” to fade before he can speak.

It seems odd that, in front of her home crowd, just nine days before an election pollsters say she will win by a thumping majority, Ms Rousseff should be second on the bill to Mr Lula da Silva and be so thoroughly upstaged by him.

But this, together with her comments on Petrobras, hints at much about her personal style and about what kind of government she will lead – if the pollsters are right – from January 1 next year.

“Under Lula, the main role of the presidency has been communication,” says Alberto Almeida, a political scientist in São Paulo. “My view is that Dilma will run it more as a generator of public policy. But the one thing only a president can do is communication – the rest you have to delegate.”

Mr Lula da Silva, indeed, has proved a consummate communicator and delegator – often to Ms Rousseff. He may seek an international role at the G20 or other international body but is expected to remain active in Brazilian politics.

She may lack her patron’s communication skills but few doubt her dedication to policy. During almost eight years as a senior figure in the Lula administration, her role was that of hands-on manager. She oversaw the government’s flagship infrastructure investment programme and others to provide cheap housing and electricity for the poor. She also masterminded legislation now before Congress that would give the state a much bigger role in Brazil’s fast-growing oil industry.

The daughter of well-to-do Bulgarian immigrants, she joined the armed resistance against Brazil’s military dictatorship and was jailed and tortured. More recently she was diagnosed with lymphoma, from which she was pronounced cured just as she was emerging as Mr Lula da Silva’s preferred successor. Many doubt she has the political skills that have enabled Mr Lula da Silva, for example, to keep a former member of the centrist opposition as governor of the central bank, often in spite of fierce opposition from his own party. Critics also suspect that Ms Rousseff would like to see a bigger role for the state across the economy.

Indeed, her comments on the Petrobras share issue make explicit what had previously only been hinted at: the operation was partly designed to amplify public control over the company. Guido Mantega, finance minister, said the share of Petrobras’ capital held by the government and other public entities rose to 48 per cent after the issue from 40 per cent before. (The government has a majority of its voting stock.)

Yet her advisers insist oil is a special and isolated case. One senior economic adviser assured the Financial Times there would be no change to the central pillars of Brazil’s macro-economic stability: inflation targeting, a floating exchange rate and gradual reductions in public debt.

Whether public debt really is falling is a moot point. By the government’s narrow definition of net debt, it has been on a downward trend throughout the Lula administration. But gross debt has recently been on an upward trend.

It is this kind of ambiguity that has raised doubts over what direction a Rousseff administration would take. She insists there would be no change to policies that appear set to deliver economic growth of over 7 per cent this year and are likely to keep the economy expanding at what many economists see as its potential, non-inflationary rate of about 4.5 per cent. Many of these policies were inherited from the opposition by Mr Lula da Silva in 2002. Though he kept them in place, he ended the previous government’s liberal reform programme.

Ms Rousseff appears less likely than Mr Lula da Silva to resume those reforms. At most, advisers say, there will be some fine tuning of macro policies. Otherwise, continuity is the word.

That is certainly what the crowds in Porto Alegre appear to want most.

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