Timeliness doesn’t necessarily equal serendipity. That was the solemn feeling among organizers of an Aug. 14 discussion on the Brazilian elections to be held later this year.
The day before the Atlanta event, which was scheduled well in advance, news broke that Brazilian presidential candidate and rising political star Eduardo Campos died in a tragic plane crash outside the city of Santos.
A member of the Socialist party, Mr. Campos was running a distant third in the polls with only 8 percent of the vote, but the popular former governor of the northern Pernambuco state represented a moderate voice in a country beset by heavy protests in recent years over corruption and inequality.
“People are just now starting to realize the enormity of our loss,” said Paulo Sotero, director of the Brazil Institute at the Wilson Center in Washington, the event’s keynote speaker. “Maybe he was not doing well [in the polls] because we didn’t understand yesterday what we understand today.”
Brazil has been praised for lifting 30-40 million people out of poverty and into the middle class over the last decade, but that has arguably added fuel to citizens’ anger over lagging infrastructure investment, overbearing bureaucracy and a byzantine tax structure. The more they’re exposed to the outside world through the Internet and travel, the more they begin to ask more of their leaders.
“We have a growing middle class that is demanding more, faster, better – of everything,” Mr. Sotero said. In protests in the run-up to this year’s World Cup in the soccer-crazed nation, many citizens took to the streets demanding “FIFA-quality” hospitals and schools.
With its economy “stagnant” after the boom years of the mid-2000s, the country needs to enact reforms and open its economy to continue its transition to a more equal society, said Mr. Sotero.
“The decisions that Brazil has to make are very difficult, they are very painful, they will require compromise – political support and compromise – and (Mr. Campos) was sort of the messenger for this,” he added.
The grandson of a prominent socialist persecuted for opposing the dictatorship in the 1960s, Mr. Campos was a unique leader from the political left who understood the needs and frustrations of common people but wanted to undertake reforms in a business-friendly way, Mr. Sotero said.
“He was above all, a man that has shown us that there is a post-ideological way to approach politics. He was a very special member of the Brazilian left because he rejected polarization between the Workers’ party and the Social Democratic Party that has paralyzed the political debate in Brazil. He proposed something that was different.”
He represented unity of purpose that helped Brazil achieve democracy in 1985, economic stability in the early 1990s and drastic poverty reduction over the last decade – all elements of the same continuous story of Brazil’s development,, Mr. Sotero said.
A few days after the event, Mr. Sotero was headed to Recife for a scheduled talk but also to “say goodbye to a dear friend.”
Lucia Jennings, president of the Atlanta-based Brazilian American Chamber of Commerce Southeast, said the chamber had hosted Mr. Campos long before his presidential bid. He came to Atlanta in 2010 as governor of Pernambuco state, which has had a sister-state affiliation with Georgia since the 1970s.
Mr. Campos’s running mate, Marina Silva, is set to take his spot in the race against current President Dilma Rousseff and Senator Aécio Neves. Ms. Silva is a wildcard, having won 19 percent of the vote as a Green Party candidate in 2010 presidential elections. In the first polls since Mr. Campos’ death, analysts said her entry into the race would force a runoff that would be too close to call.
Opening to the World
Whoever wins will face the task of retooling Brazil’s economic engine, which sputtered after rising on the back of a China-sponsored commodity boom in the mid-2000s.
Mr. Sotero said without new policies to encourage innovation and integration with the rest of the world, Brazil is at risk of falling further behind. While the country has world-class talent and various centers of innovation, many of its best minds are leaving for more receptive research environments where their innovations can be commercialized.
Mr. Sotero also said there was absolutely no link between the outcome of the World Cup and the elections in Brazil, but he noted that the country’s performance demonstrated how its insular nature has hindered growth. Brazil’s national team can’t hire foreign coaches, and its own usually speak only Portuguese, closing the team off to the newest methodologies from around the world. Germany’s 7-1 drubbing of Brazil in the semifinals was proof of that danger.
The same goes for the economy, of which foreign trade makes up less than 2 percent.
Still, the panel of experts was optimistic about Brazil’s future, even in light of the political problems, because of what they see as its most prized asset: its people, who were welcoming enough that more than 80 percent of foreigners who attended the World Cup said they had a positive experience.
“There was a sense of accomplishment that the country shared its soul to tall tourists, even our Argentinian neighbors,” said Hermano Ribeiro, the Brazilian consul general in Atlanta. “I’m always optimistic about Brazil, because I know that the people what we have are far better than what we have for the politicians in most cases.”
Novelis Inc.’s Manfred Stanek, the Austrian-born vice president and chief commercial officer, who has worked extensively in Brazil, said he has hope for the country because its people have begun to articulate their desires for change in a clearer way than ever before.
“The threshold for pain in Brazil is extremely high – extremely high,” Mr. Manfred Stanek said. “And this is changing.”
But overall, Brazil needs productivity and innovation to create more global brands like the few that are at the upper echelon of their industries, like jet manufacturer Embraer.
“It would be great if we had 20 more Embraers to talk about,” Mr. Stanek said.
The discussion was organized by the Brazilian-American Chamber of Commerce Southeast and the World Affairs Council of Atlanta.
