Brazil's President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva is prohibited by the country's constitution from serving more than two terms, which is why he cannot seek re-election in the Oct. 3 national vote.
Brazil's constitution speaks only of two consecutive terms. What if Mr. da Silva (whom everybody calls Lula) steps aside for this election, but then returns to the fray in 2014? It's seems implausible, but not impossible. He would be only 69 years old in 2014. He's immensely popular now, and apparently loves the job. Presiding over the Summer Olympics in Rio in 2016 might be very tempting indeed.
In the meantime, Mr. da Silva is trying to get his chief-of-staff, Dilma Rousseff, elected president as candidate of the Workers Party (PT). She's running against Jose Serra, a veteran politician who is governor of Sao Paulo state.
It's a function of the convergence of Brazilian politics that whoever wins is unlikely to shift course from the one established by Mr. da Silva, who, in turn, built on the policies of his more conservative predecessors. It was Mr. da Silva, after all, who said after his re-election in 2006: “We transform ourselves by taking the middle road. That's the road that must be followed by society.” Mr. Serra, who leads in the polls, is a social democrat promising to improve but not significantly alter Mr. da Silva's policies. Ms. Rousseff says she's the candidate of continuity, which is what one would expect from a chief-of-staff. Neither of them has Mr. da Silva's charisma, but then nobody does in Brazilian politics.
Canadians sometimes groan about how many parties they have – five, counting the Greens – that produce minority governments. In Brazil, there are 27 at last count (although five large ones), 11 in the President's coalition, courtesy of a system of proportional representation. The most important party in the coalition, apart from Mr. da Silva's, is a centrist one.
It's a bit of a Mad Hatter's system, especially because the list of candidates is “open” – that is, not preordained by each party. So voters sometimes pick and choose candidates of different stripes, candidates stress their individual qualities rather than being party members, and, once elected, members of parliament switch parties with an abandon arguably found nowhere else in the world.
A lot of politicians in this system are judged by how much political pork they can bring to their districts, and the President seems to be obliged to cut deals with regional kingpins and party big shots to put together and maintain his parliamentary majority.
There's also plenty of money sloshing around. Brazil ranks 80th of 180 countries in Transparency International's Corruption Perceptions Index for the public sector. Throughout Mr. da Silva's terms, a series of corruption scandals erupted, none touching him personally, however.
In another political culture, these might have damaged many individuals and the entire political class. In Brazil, there seems to be a shrugging attitude that politics runs this way, and always has. Brazilians tell pollsters that democracy, for all its faults, including corruption, is a better system than any other.
Public-opinion surveys suggest that residents in the shantytowns, or favelas , that pockmark Brazilian cities don't think many benefits have flowed their way. But the President's party still scores well among low-income voters, many of whom have received the celebrated Bolsa Familia , the government payment to more than 11 million poor families in exchange for vaccinating the very young and keeping those between 7 and 15 years of age in school.
In the poor, vast northeastern part of Brazil, the President has been very popular. That's where his chosen successor, Ms. Rousseff, must score heavily, since Mr. Serra will surely do well in his fief of populous Sao Paulo.
The gap between Brazil's poor and rich remains huge, despite some narrowing in the last decade. A country with such gaps is asking for low productivity, crime and economic under-performance, all of which Brazil still has.
The rich still dominate the media. Glossy magazines are full of their doings. Soap operas chronicle the fictional lives of the glamorous, in a society where physical beauty, actual or contrived, is an obsession.
Providing better education, health care, security from crime and jobs for the poor, and widening the middle class, ought to be Brazil's overriding objectives. Judging by what the presidential candidates are saying, it would appear these are their priorities.
