Editorial: Dilma Rousseff 2.0

12/29/2014 - 10h06

The most common - and almost foolish - reaction is to imagine that a reelected president would have the intention to continue, in his second administration, the paths and guidelines that were adopted his first time around.

The case of Dilma Rousseff (PT) escapes, in some aspects, the triviality of that idea. From an exaggerated perspective, it is as if the president were actually starting her administration now, which would have little in common with the jammed administrative effort of recent times.

Is that interpretation justified? Some believe Dilma Rousseff 2.0 would come to undo the harm left by her predecessor - who was, however, herself. The scenario is unlikely, but it is worth analyzing the factors that make it probable.

The first factor was the choice of Joaquim Levy as the head of the Finance ministry. It showed that there are concerns regarding fiscal control and tariff realism entirely unrelated to the arrangements and improvisations that characterized the last years of the administration of the former Finance Minister, Guido Mantega.

All evidence points to a potential distance between Rousseff's first and second administrations, which would be, in that respect, as clear as if her adversary in the last election, Aécio Neves (PSDB), had won the dispute.

Another point in which the new administration can differ from its recent past is in the case of Petrobras. Even as a self-defense reflex, the new Rousseff team cannot go back to the times of the Lula administration and avoid the responsibility for the disorder in Petrobras.

Although Rousseff has already been participating in Petrobras's decision-taking processes for over a decade, she can still claim that, the decision to draw attention to the disastrous deal of the refinery in Pasadena, in the U.S., was ultimately hers.

Moreover, the divergences between Rousseff and the former president of Petrobras, José Sérgio Gabrielli, along with the major members of his team, are well known.

From the specific news on the Petrobras scandal, we can easily shift to a third factor which can pressure for a change in presidential power in Rousseff's second administration. It is more risky and uncertain and it regards Rousseff's relation with former president Lula.

As Rousseff tries to dodge direct responsibility for the fall of Petrobras, she cannot avoid placing the problem on the back of Lula, her predecessor.

Lula, in turn - given an unfavorable economic scenario, an orthodox Finance minister and the political liability of the investigations in Petrobras - would hardly resist the temptation of stressing disagreement with the Rousseff administration, aiming his own return in four years' time.

Some signals of the distance between the former and the current president have already been made clear. Gilberto Carvalho, who is the closest person to Lula among Rousseff's ministers, is being replaced by Miguel Rossetto as General Secretary of the Presidency of the Republic.

Few of the PT members in Rousseff's new team have the approval of those undisputedly close to Lula. Aloizio Mercadante, Presidential Chief of Staff, and José Eduardo Cardozo, the head of the Justice ministry, were somewhat marginal in Lula's areas of influence.

If the PT already had enough reasons to complain of having an economist like Joaquim Levy as the minister of Finance, it is undeniable that the new ministry has further proximity with rightists and the business sector.

Not only Agriculture Minister Kátia Abreu is hard to digest for whatever is left of ideological in the PT, but also Gilberto Kassab, the new Minister of Cities, and the surprising news of theologian and TV host George Hilton, a member of the PRB, to replace Aldo Rebelo as the head of the Sports Ministry are signals - alongside the well-known and continuous physiologic entourage and the members of the PMDB - of a conservative voice coming from Dilma Rousseff's quarter.

Those facts - in Brazilian politics as we know it - don't free President Rousseff from the problems that political party staffing and the PT's intimidation have created so far. Breaking the links with Lula demands a greater dependence on the "rented" big and small political parties.

The risk of changing dependences could pay off if the president absorbed messages and projects which can strengthen her personal image. That is what occurred temporarily at the time when she decided to "clean up" the government.

However, in the past four years we have seen a president with reduced capacity to reset the conjuncture in her favor.

Oblivious to the difference between leadership and truculence, between firmness and stubbornness, Rousseff has constantly come out as smaller than the challenges her position proposes - which, to be fair, she evaluates without fear or frivolity.

In her campaign, Dilma Rousseff made progress in the challenge of political reform - she certainly knows of the countless damage that corruption deals to the country; she faces pressing impositions in the areas of social security, taxes and infrastructure.

Considering her style, which is not that of aptitude and congeniality, perhaps she has no other choice other than taking on those problems with a resigned sense of the limits of her mission.

Given her reduced potential of political "virtù", however, we cannot but consider the expectation of success in her second administration exaggerated, in comparison with the level that the country needs.

Translated by THOMAS MUELLO

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