CORRUPTION-BRAZIL: Lula’s Approval Ratings Unscathed

By Mario Osava Reprint | | Print |

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Jul 13 2005 (IPS) - The string of corruption scandals that has affected Brazil’s ruling party and its allies has not even dented President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s popularity, according to the latest poll.

A survey released Tuesday by the National Transport Confederation found that 40.3 percent of 2,000 Brazilians interviewed Jul. 5-7 continued to hold a positive view of the Lula administration, slightly up from 39.8 percent in late May.

Meanwhile, 59.9 percent said they approved of Lula’s personal performance, compared to 57.4 percent in late May.

The July poll was carried out a month after the first allegations surfaced of bribes allegedly paid by the leftist governing Workers’ Party (PT) to lawmakers from allied conservative parties in order to secure their support for government-sponsored legislation.

Prior to the late May poll, the press had only reported supposed acts of corruption in the state-run postal service, implicating the Brazilian Labour Party (PTB), which is known for backing all of the administrations that have governed Brazil since the 1980s.

The scandal continued to snowball in June, when Deputy Roberto Jefferson, president of the PTB, accused leaders of the PT and of the Liberal Party (PL) and Progressive Party (PP) of operating a corruption ring in Congress and several public enterprises.

The allegations voiced by Jefferson – who is himself implicated in the postal service scandal – led to the resignation of Lula’s chief of staff, José Dirceu, who was considered the most powerful minister outside of the area of the economy.

Last week, the president of the PT, José Genoino, and three of the party’s secretaries also lost their posts.

Jose Vieira da Silva, an aide to a local PT leader in the northeastern state of Ceará, was arrested last Friday attempting to board a plane in the Sao Paulo airport carrying 100,000 dollars under his clothes and 200,000 reals (83,000 dollars) in his suitcases, the origins of which he was unable to explain.

Vieira da Silva worked for Ceará state Deputy Jose Guimaraes, a member of the PT and Genoino’s brother.

The poll conducted by the Sensus Institute for the National Transport Confederation – which carries out near-monthly surveys – found that 67.1 percent of respondents believed that Jefferson’s accusations were accurate.

But only 33.6 percent believed Lula knew about the alleged bribes to legislators of allied parties, while 45.7 percent said the president was not responsible since he was unaware of what was going on.

With respect to the stance that Lula has taken towards the scandal, 47.8 percent approved and 31.9 percent disapproved.

Lula remains the front-runner in the polls for the October 2006 presidential elections. His closest rival is the same adversary he defeated in 2002: Sao Paulo Mayor José Serra, of the opposition Brazilian Social Democracy Party.

The president led Serra by 37.1 to 19.1 percent in Tuesday’s poll.

With a cabinet shuffle that began last week, Lula is attempting to ensure the continued support of the Brazilian Democratic Movement Party (PMDB), which groups various centrist factions with neither ideological nor political unity.

A majority of PMDB legislators have decided to back the government, and in exchange members of the party were appointed to three important ministries: mines and energy, health and communications.

Besides creating a modified cabinet capable of governing with majority support until late 2006, Lula’s challenge now is to shore up the image of the PT, which has been accused of heading up a broad corruption network that purportedly used public companies to finance the party and bribe allied legislators.

Education Minister Tarso Genro replaced Genoino as PT president last weekend. Two other ministers also left the cabinet to assume key leadership posts in the party, reflecting an all-out effort by the PT to recover from the scandal.

If there have been corruption and other errors in the PT, whoever was responsible will have to be punished, said Lula, who admitted that the congressional, police and legal investigations into the allegations against PT leaders are expanding.

The new PT president said his party made the mistake of believing it held a “monopoly on ethics” and that it was the “purest” of all of Brazil’s political groupings.

Genro, one of the party’s leading thinkers, also said the PT was a victim of the “vacuum of paradigms” or ideologies since the worldwide collapse of socialism.

In his view, the PT’s leadership methods must undergo a radical change and the party must be renovated with transparency to enable it to recover its credibility as a mouthpiece for popular causes.