IT’S A classic case of a rising tide lifting all boats. Strange as it may seem, arguably the most defining social transformation wrought in the new Brazil by its popular socialist president is the explosion of the country’s middle class. More than 30 million have joined its ranks in the last five years, lifted by steady growth in an economy set to become the fifth largest in the world this year, and which has rightly staked its claim to be treated as the regional power and one of the big boys of world politics, trade and economics.
However eight years on, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva – “Lula” – whose successor will be elected on Sunday, and whose approval rating is running at 80 per cent, will want his legacy to be perceived as the lifting of some 21 million out of poverty, with the prospect of its complete elimination by 2016. In the last six years the income of poor Brazilians grew three times faster than that of their wealthy counterparts and the country should meet its Millennium Development Goal target of reducing infant mortality by 75 per cent three years ahead of schedule.
Lula will almost certainly succeed in passing the presidential mantle to his Workers Party colleague, his uncharismatic former chief of staff, Dilma Rousseff, a former guerilla who fought the dictatorship in the 1970s and now an economist and technocrat. She is contesting her first elected office but appears likely to take it with a majority on the first count. Her message is politically unthreatening – a continuity of market-based policies and a strengthening of state enterprise, notably in oil and telecommunications.
That succession, and the prospect of the re-election of a supportive parliamentary majority, is testimony to Lula’s remarkable achievement in shifting his party in government from its street-marching, far-left roots into the much-admired voice of mainstream social democracy across the continent, and is a sharp contrast to the populist, left-leaning nationalist governments in neighbouring Venezuela and Bolivia.
Lula’s domestic legacy is also matched by an important international one. Among other initiatives, the country’s engagement with the Bric group of emerging nations – Brazil, Russia, India and China – and its successful insistence that G20 replace G7 as a principal forum for international economic co-ordination, have helped foster an important realignment in global institutional politics. That new logic should contribute to the acceptance of the need for reform of the UN Security Council and a seat there for Brazil.