[Marxism] Re: Brazilian runoff as per Folha de Sao Paulo

[Louis Proyect]

Walter wrote:
>(As predicted, the U.S. media, always keen to pit Lula against Chavez
>and Castro, is now supporting his rightist opponent and denouncing
>Lula, from the right. The L.A. Times complains Lula isn't consertive
>enough to suit them. Whatever Lula did or didn't do, Helena Heloisa is
>now sitting out the runoff, expressing a magisterial dismissal from the
>heights of her moral superiority, a plague on both their houses. What
>will Heloisa's international supporters do now? We'll very soon see.)

What will Heloisa's international supporters do now? This is a ridiculous 
question, isn't it? As far as I know, the only group that is explicitly 
pro-Heloisa is the ISO based on Lee Sustar's article in Counterpunch: 
http://www.counterpunch.org/sustar09282006.html. I wouldn't expect the ISO 
to wilt under pressure from Walter Lippmann and back Lula. After all, they 
have no use for Fidel Castro, let alone a left-centrist like Lula.

I wouldn't worry that much about what the LA Times writes. There is at 
least one newspaper with as much clout that look benignly on Lula, starting 
with Rupert Murdoch's London Times. Now, I could play Walter's game and 
bait him with the accusation that he and the Murdoch press are in a bloc to 
support Lula, but I won't. We all know that Walter is acting as a tribune 
for the Latin American revolution, based on his yearly jaunts to Cuba and 
his assiduous reading of the Cuban press:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,11069-2385304.html
Chastened Lula must press on with reforms
World Briefing by Bronwen Maddox

TO FAIL to clinch an election when the world had predicted that you would 
sweep home is a huge blow. Yesterday Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Brazil’s 
President, was trying to put a brave face on the upset, which leaves him 
facing a second election at the end of this month to hold on to his job.

This is worrying. Not because Lula has been a superb President; he hasn’t. 
But he has been much, much better than many feared when, with world-class 
charisma, he swept to power as Brazil’s first leader from a poor family, 
claiming its millions of impoverished people were “in every cell” of his body.

He is still the likely winner on October 29. It is hard to imagine that his 
challenger, Geraldo Alckmin, a former governor of São Paulo, Brazil’s most 
populous state, can upset him. Brazilians have had a lot of fun with 
Alckmin’s profession — he is an anaesthesiologist — joking that he puts 
them to sleep.

If it is to be Lula, then it is important that he presses on with reform 
faster than he has yet done — and he must excise the corruption in his 
Government, which nearly cost him the election.

This election matters far beyond Brazil. The country’s growth and stability 
matter enormously to its continent. But as one of the giants of the 
developing world, its struggles have worldwide resonance; it needs to show 
that it can find the recipe for prosperity.

We can add the confident headlines of the past fortnight to the long case 
history of how opinion polls can get it wrong. “Unlovely landslide,” 
predicted Newsweek; “Polls show Lula with popularity unscathed by scandals 
and still winning in the first round,” said Goldman Sachs.

(clip)

The best that Brazil can probably hope for is Lula, again, but chastened by 
his near-death experience in the first round. Not a quick answer to its 
problems, but a long way from disaster.



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