Dilma Rousseff won in the closest and most turbulent Presidential Election since 1989 because the people get to vote, not the markets. The majority of these are people whose quality of life has improved over the last 12 years and who simply trust the party which delivered that improvement to continue their work – no […]
13/02/2014. A curious phenomenon is occurring in Brasil. Since June last year, a considerable number of protesters who have taken to the streets against the World Cup, the government, Cuban doctors, the price of the subway / bus or to support anti-corruption protests, are not leftist students or even troublemakers; these are people who belong to the economic, […]
Brasil has a healthy and noisy media landscape; from sophisticated daily papers and weekly magazines comparable to any in Europe, right through to trashy supermarket rags like you see across the United States. But at the top level there is a deep undercurrent of conservatism that often goes unnoticed, a conservatism that pre-dates any of […]
With election campaigning entering its critical phase you could be forgiven for thinking that Brasil was in the throes of economic meltdown, with foreign reports adding a thin sprinkling of credence to such claims & perception. But by global, or even by Brazilian standards, is it remotely fair to call the current state of the […]
President With Marina Silva’s support collapsing during the final week of campaigning, her 21.3% and Dilma Rousseff’s 41.6% were in line with the previous polls, however Aecio Neves performed well above any predictions, and took most by surprise with 33.5% In a second round between Rousseff & Neves, Rousseff is still expected to win, but three […]
In the October 2014 Brazilian Elections, across 5,570 municipalities, 450,000 polling stations and approximately 530,000 electronic voting machines will be used. Electronic voting in Brasil was first trialled in the state of Santa Catarina in 1996, and since 2000, all Brazilian elections have been fully electronic. With voting compulsory (although blank votes are permitted), at general elections voters […]
Dilma Rousseff is often regarded as a great unknown outside of Brasil but she has been an active force in official politics since the mid 1970s when she attended meetings organised by the only opposition party allowed by the then Military Dictatorship, the Democratic Movement Party (MDB), while studying Economics at the Federal University of […]
When, in one of its first foreign policy positions, the Brazilian government – charged, together with the US, with concluding the negotiations for the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) – blocked the North American project of a free trade zone, the positions of the two countries started to grow apart. Since then, the […]
Brazil’s presidential election campaign, already marked by tragedy, continues with high drama after the first-round results on 5 October 2014. The incumbent Dilma Rousseff received the most votes (41.5%). But her main rival was Aécio Neves (33.7%) rather than Marina Silva (21.4%), who had for weeks been competing for first place in the opinion polls. […]
By Darío Pignotti. “The United States strategists are firmly in agreement with the foreign policy guidelines advocated by candidate Marina Silva. If she is elected, it will be the victory of a diplomatic model similar to what Brazil used in the 1990s,” says Samuel Pinheiro Guimarães, former Foreign Ministry secretary-general during the Luiz Inácio Lula […]