Who is Marina Silva?

Valbona Muzaka - King's College London

Endless polls recording compulsively the distance between voters’ preference for the incumbent Dilma Rousseff of the PT (Partido dos Trabalhadores) and her most prominent challenger, Marina Silva of the PSB (Partido Socialista Brasileiro) suggest that Silva could potentially win the race for Brazil’s presidency this Sunday, especially if a second-round runoff becomes necessary. The rise of Marina Silva, a candidate who did not even have a party to support her presidential candidature a year ago, is undoubtedly phenomenal. 

But who is Marina Silva?

We know a lot about her life, of course. A woman who survived numerous illnesses, hard labour and extreme poverty, conquered illiteracy as a teenager, became a political activist in the Amazon alongside Chico Mendez, the youngest and first rubber-tapper to be elected as a Senator in Brazilian history at age 36, a government minister for the Environment aged 45 and, now, poised to become the president of the largest Latin American country – a mixed-race woman who has achieved all these in a country as unequal as Brazil – is without doubt a formidable woman of fierce intellect and strength, a hero on her own right.  

But the question ‘who is Marina Silva’ is rather about what she stands for, all the more pertinent a question as reportedly her unofficial election motto has become Victor Hugo’s quote "One cannot resist an idea whose time has come".  What is the irresistible idea that Marina Silva represents?

She is often referred to as a socialist, an environmentalist, a progressive, an outsider/newcomer, the first black would-be president of Brazil and so on. Following the last chapter of this charged presidential election race mostly in Brazil has made me think that the irresistible idea she claims to represent is not to be found in these labels, if it is to be found at all. 

Firstly, Marina Silva is not a socialist, and neither is the membership of the Partido Socialista Brasileiro; insofar as socialism is understood as a distinct way of organizing the economy and society, the ‘socialist’ in the PSB is an empty signifier. In any case, her commitment to the PSB is to last until her own party is legalized; before Silva surprised many by joining the PSB, she had tried (and failed) to create her own party (Rede Sustantibilidade – Sustainability Network); before than had joined the Green Party (Partido Verde) on whose ticket she run for the 2010 presidential elections winning nearly 20% of the vote (later she left the PV); and, even earlier, had been a member of the PT until shortly after she resigned from Lula’s government in 2008. The fact that party-switching is common in Brazil may explain this trajectory, but it also weakens claims that Marina Silva is an outsider.  

Secondly, Marina Silva is not exactly a progressive candidate, at least not in the way I understand the term.  In economic terms, Silva’s programme is no different from that of Aécio Neves, the centre-right presidential candidate (PSDB) and is as orthodox as it can be. One of Silva’s biggest backers is banking heir Maria Alice Setubal, who is also acting as her campaign coordinator. That Silva has become the darling of financial capital, domestic and international, is evident in the rise of country’s stocks every time polls indicate she’s edging forward. Her main economic advisors are neoliberal economist Eduardo Giannetti da Fonseca and André Lara Resende, the latter having been one of the main economic advisers of President Henrique Cardoso, the dependista-turned-neoliberal president of Brazil during 1995-2002. Both vouch that a Silva government would be business-friendly, would cut public spending, roll back subsidized credit, lower barriers to foreign competition and, importantly, return to the so-called ‘tripod’ of strong fiscal responsibility, inflation targeting and floating exchange rates. Central Bank independence, fiscal balance and primary surplus are fundamental to the programme: as her economic adviser Giannetti put it “we will not sacrifice [them] to any adventure in social spending”. 

In social terms, Silva is not exactly the progressive candidate her past struggles would warrant either. Certainly, Bolsa Família is there to stay, for no presidential candidate in her right mind would dare propose cuts to this programme without antagonizing the numerous poor; in any case, it is a cheap programme consuming around 0.6% of the GDP. More importantly, how Silva would honour her promise of increased investment in health and education in the context of her orthodox economic policy remains a mystery. 

But I am referring here mainly to her unclear and sometimes conservative position vis-à-vis social issues such as abortion, same sex marriage and LGBT rights, on which she has performed a number of U-turns leaving observers perplexed. If gender equality and women’s empowerment is a strong part of her electoral platform, I am guilty of having missed it entirely. Much of her positioning regarding these and other issues must be understood in light of her conversion to evangelical (Pentecostal) Christian faith in 1997, a trajectory that eventually alienated some of her earliest co-activists and friends, most notably Leonardo Boff, one of the best known supporters of Liberation Theology in Brazil and beyond.    

Thirdly, Silva’s commitment to environmentalism is still strong, but it hardly deserves the label radical. Amongst the three main candidates, she has by far the strongest environmental record, on account of her early activism in Acre and her record as the Environmental Minister in the Lula government during 2003-8. It was during this period that Silva, the defender of the forest that once had been her home, often came head to head with various figures, not least the modernist Rousseff, then Energy Minister and later Chief of Staff, and on account of which conflicts she resigned, although Lula (currently supporting Rousseff’s candidacy) claimed later that Silva resigned because God had told her to.  Whatever the truth may be, it is clear that Silva has made some substantial concessions to her former ‘enemies’ in her bid for the presidency, most notably, disavowing her earlier opposition to GMOs as a ‘myth’, cozying up to the sugar, ethanol and big agribusiness by adopting a ‘flexible’ approach in which both conservation and big agriculture would thrive side-by-side, and choosing Beto Albuquerque, a southern deputy with strong links to agribusiness, as her running mate.

Fourthly, all of the above should make clear that Marina Silva is neither an outsider, nor a newcomer to the Brazilian political system. Her impressive trajectory is, however, as unique as Lula’s was, even if the two Silvas represent very different marginalised Brazils. To the extent that Marina Silva would stay true to her community roots should she win, it would truly be the first time this (rather substantial but marginalised) Brazil had a voice in the country’s political life.  Even through Brazil had a ‘black’ president a while ago (Nilo Peçanha), she would also be the first non-white Brazilian president to publically claim the label ‘black’ as her own in a country where the political and economic elite is predominantly white.

In order to win the presidency, Marina Silva must naturally appeal to non-whites and whites alike, something she is trying to do on a ‘new politics’ platform that seeks to appeal to the many in Brazil seeking change, but whose elements, some of which have been highlighted here, are often drawn from old, orthodox and conservative political currents. Just like the street protests last year (whose dissatisfaction Silva wants to convert to votes) aired a cacophony of sometimes contradictory voices, so does the ambiguous platform on which she seems to be running. There seems to me to be only two clear elements in her electoral platform: her largely neo-liberal economic programme and her personal faith in God who has chosen her to be the next president of Brazil. Since economic policy is not her forte, the former is not really of her own making; the latter is very much so, and I suspect is the irresistible idea whose time Marina Silva thinks has come. I hope I will be proven wrong.