Will Rousseff make a miracle for Brazil?
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Brazil is good at making miracles. In the end of the 1960s and early 1970s, Brazil achieved economic growth rates that were higher than 10 percent. This was dubbed as the "Brazilian economic miracle." In 2002, Brazil created another miracle in the political area by electing Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a former worker with little formal education who had lost half of his finger in a work-related accident, as president. Now Brazil has produced one more miracle by choosing Dilma Rousseff as its first female president in the nation's history.
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Dilma Rousseff |
Politically speaking, Rousseff's victory has two significant meanings. On one hand, it means that Brazil's political stage, which was once controlled by the traditional parties before Lula, has consolidated its populist nature. On the other, Latin America's political weather vane continues to point toward the left despite the victory of Sebastián Piñera, a center-right politician in Chile's presidential campaign.
Lula was described as the "Most Popular Politician on Earth" by Newsweek magazine. Although Rousseff won the presidency with powerful support from the charismatic Lula, she is herself popular among the lower classes, who have benefited greatly from the "Bolsa Familia" and "Zero Hunger" programs over the past few years. It is believed that these anti-poverty programs will continue to be Rousseff's priority.
But Rousseff will have to pay attention to the grave issue of unequal income distribution in Brazil. Its Gini coefficient, though declining in the past several years, is still as high as 0.6. In addition, Rousseff will have to deal with a rising crime rate and confrontations between the landless-peasant movement and the big landlords. This sad reality has made some of the urban and the rural areas a horrible place to live.
Under Lula, Brazil was the last country in the group of the emerging economies to be hit by the global financial crisis, and the first to get rid of its contagion effect. It is estimated that Brazil's GDP growth rate for 2010 will stand at more than 7 percent, one of the highest in Latin America. Can Rousseff maintain this high growth rate during her term?
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