WORLD, Page 38BRAZILPutting His Best Foot ForwardPresident-elect Collor is young, attractive -- and in need ofluckBy Michael S. Serrill/Reported by Laura Lopez/Brasilia
In political terms, he came from nowhere: a well-bred
landowner's son and former governor from the tropical hinterland
who compared himself with Jimmy Carter. The similarities do not go
far: like Carter, he ran against the federal government, tilting
at its waste and mismanagement, but when it came to down-and-dirty
campaigning, he seemed more like Richard Nixon. The combination
worked: last week, after a heated runoff election, Fernando Collor
de Mello, 40, won 43% of the vote, vs. his leftist opponent's 38%,
to emerge as Brazil's first popularly elected President in 29
years. Scheduled to take office in Brasilia on March 15 to serve
a five-year term, the conservative politician will be the youngest
chief executive in his country's history.
Many might wonder why he sought the distinction. Brazil, with
a population of 147 million, is now the eighth largest economy in
the noncommunist world -- and one of the sickest. Under President
Jose Sarney, who took office in 1985, it has run up the Third
World's largest foreign debt ($110 billion), is being choked by
bureaucracy and is mired in hyperinflation. Collor's credentials
for curing those woes are slender: he served only one term in the
National Congress, and the sleepy northeastern state he governed,
Alagoas, has only 2.3 million people. Last week, however, Collor
exuded confidence. "The problems of Brazil cannot be solved by a
party or a small group of people," he declared, adding that he
would seek a "wide national understanding" on social reforms to
revive the country.
Consensus may be difficult to attain after the polarized
election campaign. The runoff contest narrowed the 21-candidate
field to Collor and a gritty dark-horse opponent, Luis Inacio Lula
da Silva, a union leader and former industrial lathe operator who
heads the leftist Workers' Party. Lula pounded away at populist
themes -- he warned Collor that his landholdings would be subject
to agrarian reform -- and outpointed the young conservative in the
first of two televised debates. Toward the campaign's close, Collor
took the low road, airing campaign spots that featured the married
Lula's former lover, but the two continued to run neck and neck.
Only at the end did the conservative pull away.
The victory marked an extraordinarily quick rise by Collor,
scion of a wealthy political and publishing family in Alagoas. His
father Arnon de Mello, a federal Senator, earned a bizarre niche
in Brazilian history in 1963 when he shot a fellow legislator to
death on the Senate floor. The elder Collor served several months
in jail before it was decided that he had acted in self-defense.
Fernando Collor eventually took over management of the family
media properties in Alagoas, which today include a newspaper,
several radio stations and the local affiliate of the powerful
Globo private television network. In 1979, the military government
of the day appointed Collor mayor of the Alagoan capital, Maceio.
In 1982 he was elected a federal deputy, and in 1986 he returned
to Alagoas as governor.
Collor used the position shrewdly to create a national
reputation for himself as the "hunter of maharajas" -- elite civil
servants who earn exorbitant salaries, often for no-show jobs.
Collor launched a campaign against the practice by setting a
ceiling on officials' salaries and restricting use of state funds
for the purchase of cars, houses and other amenities. The move
struck a chord among ordinary Brazilians, who resent the privileges
of the bureaucracy and its suffocating inefficiency.
During his presidential campaign, Collor hammered away at the
antigovernment, antibureaucracy theme. He promised to privatize
many of Brazil's oversize state industries, strip away excessive
layers of government staffing, crack down on waste and corruption,
bring the federal budget in line with reality and reduce inflation
to 3% a month -- low by Brazilian standards. He also promised to
spend $94 billion on housing, education and health services for the
poor. Collor's resulting popularity among the country's
shirt-sleeved masses, declared a bitter Lula, is undeserved. The
President-elect, he predicted, "will govern in favor of big
business, the armed forces and the International Monetary Fund."
There is certainly no shortage of skepticism about Collor's
chances of succeeding, even though Brazil's foreign bankers
generally approved of the people's choice. "No Brazilian politician
has a shred of credibility in the marketplace," says Lawrence
Brainard, a senior vice president at Bankers Trust, a major
Brazilian creditor. "So people will simply discard what Collor said
prior to elections and see what he actually does."
Collor's skills as a political tactician will also be tested.
His power base, the National Reconstruction Party, controls only
a few seats in the congress. The new President will need to create
alliances with centrist parties and rely on a bandwagon effect from
his victory to govern effectively. Though he denies it, Collor is
known to be deeply superstitious, never entering a room, for
example, except with his right foot first. Now he needs to keep his
