It is quite easy to understand why the possibility of senator and ex-minister for the environment Marina Silva running for President of Brazil, in next year’s elections, can cause such excitement but also so much concern. Millions of Brazilians, sensitive to the ecological cause, to environmental and social sustainability, to climate change and our planet’s destiny, to the devastation of our ecosystems and the quality of life in our cities, yearn for a voice and a chance in the presidential campaign, so far limited to candidates promoting and proposing the classic 1960’s unsustainable model of economic growth. One can also understand the anguish of perplexed politicians asking themselves: is this Marina thing good for me? Bad for me? Will it help my strategy, will it jeopardize it? Should I bomb her? Not bomb?

It is curious how the first political reactions and journalistic analysis, since this possibility surfaced gravitate around all those pragmatic calculations yet conceal the essential: Marina Silva represents ideas and hopes shared by millions of Brazilians. Isn’t it legitimate and important for Brazilian democracy to have them on stage in a two turn presidential election?

The minimalist dimension would be a highly instructive campaign not only in large scale defensive environmental mobilization: stop burning the Amazon rainforest and emitting CO2; but, also, in affirming something the hegemons of current Brazilian development just can’t understand: our economic and social future depends on our possibility of creating a new green economy. No other country is so well positioned as Brazil to do so and attract massive investments for its eco-development. But, so far, we are stuck with our monocultures, our systematic devastation of biodiversity just to extend more and more cattle pastures and soy plantations, with our subsidies to polluting and carbon emitting vehicles (or unnecessary coal plants!) as well as highways through the heart of the rainforest.

But there is more to it. Marina has the potential to transcend just a vigorous first turn campaign bound to extract concessions for green programs from one or both candidates remaining on the final ballot. She can be, herself the agent of revolution in our political system and the one to deal with this notorious abyss of Brazilian politics: the compulsory alliance of both social-democratic parties, the PT and the PSDB, with the old political oligarchies in the pursuit of governance. PT and PSDB struggle, as former president Fernando Henrique Cardoso once admitted, to decide who will lead the rearguard of Brazilian old politics and govern with it’s costly support. In the context of our instable electoral system of personal proportional voting --in Brazil we vote for individual candidates and a party’s performance is the addition of personal votes-- both PT and PSDB depend on coalition alliances with professional hack and patronage politicians to govern. It would be far better if they could work it out together but as the central dispute is between them their rivalry is ferocious.

We, the Greens, dialog with the two social-democratic currents and recognize that both have had positive economic and social achievements in their governments since 1994. Marina would be fit to promote new governance with both transcending at last this bizarre opposition so as to isolate the political oligarchies and open the way for a reform of our electoral system drying up its dependence on large scale corruption, cronyism, patronage, mismanagement and political abuse of public service, ballot buying through cash or politicians’ “assistance centers”. Marina could offer not just environmental, social and economic but institutional sustainability as well. We are entitled to dream a different country and fight to make it real though we know this cause transcends by far our limited ranks. At this time, we do not know, in fact, if Marina will be candidate for the presidency. It is a very tough decision, intimate and faith based, that we will just have to wait for.

The political direction nevertheless is crystal clear: it is not anti-PT. We share great fraternity especially with the Acre(Marina’s Amazon state) PT, originally established through our close relationship to Chico Mendes, the rainforest defense leader killed in 1988. We`re are not anti-PSDB either. We are certainly not anti-Lula although we cannot give up criticizing him for his frequently conservative and misleading attitudes on environmental issues. We are eventually building the policies and politics towards a post-Lula era.


* Alfredo Sirkis is a journalist, writer, city councilor, chairman of the Greens in Rio de Janeiro and vice-chairman of national Brazilian Greens.