A small town in central Bulgaria will be keeping its fingers crossed on Oct. 31 when Socialist candidate Dilma Rousseff appears in the presidential run-off in far-away Brazil.
Gabrovo is her father’s hometown and Rousseff still has cousins there — albeit ones she has never met.
“I jumped when I first heard on television the name Dilma Rousseff, then minister of energy and mining,” says 72-year-old Toshka Kovacheva, the wife of Rousseff’s cousin Tsvetan Kovachev.
“It was during a visit of Bulgarian President [Georgy] Parvanov to Brazil in 2003,” she said.
In a recent interview, Rousseff told Bulgaria’s 24 Hours newspaper: “I have a feeling of tenderness and love [for Bulgaria].
“I can even say I feel Bulgarian to some extent even if I have never visited my late father’s native country,” she said, adding that she would “no doubt come to visit.”
Bulgarian media — who normally give limited coverage to election results from abroad — have jumped at the news of Rousseff’s Bulgarian link, dispatching special correspondents to delve into the story, both in Brazil and in Gabrovo.
They found that her father Petar Rousseff emigrated to France in 1929 and then via Argentina to Brazil where he settled down under the name Pedro Rousseff, leaving behind his parents and a pregnant wife who thought him dead.
It was not until 1948 that his mother Tsana received a letter announcing Petar’s success as a construction entrepreneur in his adopted country, his marriage to a Brazilian woman and the birth of his three children, including Dilma, the Bulgarian cousins said.
“She owes her success to herself only, not to her parents,” her 67-year-old cousin Tsanka Kamenova said.
The focus on Rousseff’s Bulgarian origins was somewhat “exaggerated,” she said.
However, she added: “I admire her steadfastness and courage. It’s a pity that the media here are little interested in her electoral platform.”
Kovacheva described how Petar Rousseff, who died in 1962 without ever having returned to Bulgaria, kept in touch with his son Lyuben from his first marriage.
“I know that his son, also a construction engineer, wanted to join him in Brazil, but this was impossible during the [communist] regime,” she said.
Lyuben, Dilma’s half-brother, died two years ago.
Led by Kovacheva and her daughter, Gabrovo was already caught up in the excitement during the first-round presidential battle, sending Rouseff a message of support and CDs with Bulgarian folk music and dances.
Mocking their reputation for exploitation, residents were now planning how to profit from Rousseff’s link to the town.
“She should bring the Brazilian investors in — they can learn a lot about crisis management from us,” quipped pensioner Jan Georgiev.
Mayor Nikolay Sirakov had another idea: “Our spring carnival of humor might cooperate with the carnival in Rio.”
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema