Brazil’s presidential elections are only five months off, and the financial markets are watching every twist and turn in the opinion polls and news coverage of the campaign. When polls showed support for the main left wing candidate climbing, the price of Brazilian bonds and the real crashed. Now José Serra, the taciturn government candidate, has become embroiled in a corruption scandal. Two months earlier, the candidacy of Roseana Sarney, his rival from the conservative PFL party, went down in flames when her husband was implicated in another corruption scandal.
What is going on? Are mainstream Brazilian politics even more corrupt than we thought and are voters finally going to elect Luis Ignácio Lula da Silva, the Workers Party candidate?
The answer to both is ‘probably no’ and here is why.
Brazil’s election campaign only really gets going after the World Cup soccer tournament and July vacations have ended. Until then, only a political earthquake would have much effect on the elections. In any case, the outcome of the campaign is determined more in TV studios than in the streets. The election authorities allocate free TV time to candidates largely based on the number of seats their parties hold in Congress. Serra’s two-party coalition party has far more airtime than anyone else. Lula usually does well in the early months of an election year and then fizzles out as the campaign gathers speed.
How about corruption? There is no such thing as a Corruptometer to tell us how clean or crooked a politician is. However, Serra and Lula are both known to be men of considerable integrity. However, Serra’s campaign treasurer Ricardo Sérgio Oliveira, whom Veja the newsmagazine says demanded bribes in a privatization five years ago, is well-known as a shady operator. He will probably quit. Serra’s uninspiring campaign will drag on, boring Brazilians to death. But the odds are that Serra will still win and keep economic policy on the same steady track.