Brazil was officially in mourning on Thursday for Eduardo Campos, the presidential candidate who died in a plane crash on Wednesday. However, while the nation’s sympathies are with his bereaved family, all eyes are now on his most likely successor, former minister of the environment Marina Silva, an ecological campaigner with the convictions and the popularity to shake up an already tight campaign.
Silva, from a poor rubber-tapping family, is the obvious choice for the Socialist Party-led coalition. As Campos’ vice presidential running mate, she would have assumed power had he died in office.
She is also the politician most widely credited with slowing the deforestation of the Amazon — one of several reasons why she has more appeal with the electorate than any other opposition figure. As a Green Party candidate during the previous presidential election in 2010, she came in third with 19 million votes — a record for an environment party politician. In opinion polls since then, she regularly scores higher than any other politician apart from Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff.
Photo: Reuters
However, it is still not certain whether Silva will secure the nomination, which electoral law states must be made within 10 days of the death of the original candidate.
The answer depends on two things: whether Silva wants to run and whether her coalition partners will accept her. In public, Silva has kept her utterances to a brief and emotional statement of condolences to the Campos family. In private, she is said to have told aides it is too early to start thinking about the campaign.
However, it is hard to imagine that such a driven politician would not take a chance to further her sustainable development agenda. In an interview with the Guardian last year, Silva said she was trying to create her own party — the Sustainability Network — to overcome the resistance of vested political interests.
“The revolutionaries of our era are the conservationists,” she said.
Her radicalism has not gone down well with Brazil’s political class. During the presidency of Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, she was forced out of her post as environment minister after the agribusiness lobby undermined her efforts to strengthen forest protection. Last year, the high court ruled that her Sustainability Network had not gathered the necessary 500,000 signatures to launch a presidential campaign. Supporters accused the court of being politically motivated.
Rather than fall into the political wilderness, Silva joined forces with Campos in October last year. It was a somewhat odd alliance. Her new partner was head of the nominally socialist party (PSB), but he was very business-friendly.
The PSB must now approve Silva if she is to be the presidential candidate, but many in the party would prefer a candidate to come from within their ranks.
However, Silva has the support of the Campos family and no one else in the PSB has anything like her electoral appeal. The party and its allies are third, with about 10 percent of votes, behind conservative Aecio Neves with 22 percent and the president and Workers’ Party leader Rousseff with 38 percent.
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