AFP/Brasilia
Incumbent Dilma Rousseff, now trailing top rival Marina Silva in Brazil’s presidential race by 10%, went on the offensive in a televised debate, fighting for her job.
In the second debate between the main candidates ahead of the October 5 first round vote, Rousseff sought to come off the ropes three days after Brazil entered recession, asking environmentalist Silva how she would finance her some $60bn of policy commitments.
“Where do you propose to get the money from?” asked Rousseff, seeking to give her Workers Party (PT) a fourth straight term leading Latin America’s powerhouse.
“First, these are not promises, they are commitments,” responded Silva, who served as environment minister under Rousseff’s PT predecessor Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.
The money would be raised, she insisted, “through our country returning to efficiency in public spending - today there is widespread wasting of public resources,” charged Silva, who has soared in the polls since replacing Eduardo Campos, killed in an August 13 plane crash, on the Socialist ticket.
Silva accused Dilma’s administration of “making wrong choices,” leading to rising inflation and debt, low growth and forcing citizens to pay a high price for notoriously poor public services.
And she accused Brazil’s first woman president of neglecting the need to move away from dependence on fuel reserves to renewables such as biomass, wind and solar power while crippling state oil giant Petrobras by the imposition of government price controls.
Scoffing that “pessimism is not the way forward,” Rousseff hit back, careful to bracket her achievements during four years in power with those made during two terms of Lula, who backed for much of his tenure in stratospheric levels of voter approval.
Lula remains a broadly popular figure but recent polling suggests Silva, who grew up in poverty and only learned to read as a teenager, is winning over swathes of undecided voters who have grown weary of almost 12 years of PT hegemony.
“We took 35mn people out of poverty,” Rousseff hit back, referring to the introduction under Lula of the Bolsa Familia federal welfare programme and prefacing several comments lauding her government with the formula “my government and that of president Lula.”
Silva last year failed to gain enough signatures to stand on her own “sustainability network” ticket before throwing her lot in with the Socialists. Polls last week showed her level pegging on first round voter intentions with longtime favorite Rousseff and forecast to win an October 26 runoff.
Brazilian presidential candidate and incumbent, Dilma Rousseff of Partido de los Trabajadores (PT) party, speaks during the televised presidential can
