Brazil election result welcomed everywhere but US
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Dilma Rousseff of Brazil's governing Worker's Party coasted to victory against the opposition candidate José Serra, with a comfortable margin of 56 – 44 percent. But it was a bitter and ugly campaign marked by allegations of corruption and malfeasance on both sides, and ended with Serra's wife calling Dilma a "baby-killer."
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Mark Weisbrot is co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, in Washington, D.C. |
Religious groups and leaders mobilized for the Serra campaign and accused Dilma of wanting to legalize abortion, ban religious symbols, being "anti-Christian," and a "terrorist" for her resistance to the military dictatorship during the late 1960s. The whole campaign was all too reminiscent of Republican strategies in the United States, going back to the rise of the religious right in the 1980s, through the "Swift Boat" politics and Karl Rove's "Weapons of Mass Distraction" of recent years.
Serra even had a right-wing foreign policy strategy that prompted one critic to label him "Serra Palin." His campaign threatened to alienate Brazil from most of its neighbors by accusing the Bolivian government of being "complicit" in drug trafficking and Venezuela of "sheltering" the FARC (the main guerrilla group) in Colombia. He attacked Lula for his refusal – along with most of the rest of South America – to recognize the government of Honduras. The Honduran government was "elected" following a military coup last year, under conditions of censorship and human rights abuses such that only the United States and a handful of mostly right-wing allies recognized it as "free and fair."
But in the end, sanity triumphed over fear, as voters proved to be more convinced by the substantial improvements in their well being during the Lula years.
It is perhaps not surprising that Serra, an economist, would try to find a way to avoid the most important economic issues that affect the lives of the majority of Brazilians. The economy has performed much better during the Lula years than during the eight years of Serra's party (the Social Democratic Party of Brazil [PSDB] ): per capita income grew by 23 percent from 2002-2010, as opposed to just 3.5 percent for 1994-2002. Measured unemployment is now at a record low of 6.2 percent.
Perhaps even more importantly, the majority of Brazilians have seen substantial gains: the minimum wage, adjusted for inflation, grew by about 65 percent during Lula's presidency. This is more than three times the increase during the previous eight years (i.e. the presidency of Fernando Henrique Cardoso, of Serra's party). This affects not only minimum-wage workers but tens of millions of others whose income is tied to the minimum wage.
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