WHEN BRAZILIAN voters ended a mostly sedate campaign by choosing Dilma Rousseff as their new president, it was the culmination of historic changes that the United States ought to welcome and encourage. Rousseff and her mentor, outgoing president Luis Inacio Lula da Silva, have pushed for a healthy combination of free-market economics, benefits for the poor, and a genuine respect for democracy. This mix has left Brazil increasingly prosperous — an economic record that puts to shame Venezuela’s constitution-altering President Hugo Chavez.
The extraordinarily popular Lula, who kept his promise to step aside after two terms, started out as a left-wing labor leader who tried to improve the lot of Brazil’s underprivileged first through the union movement and then in electoral politics. But his approach to governing proved reformist as well as populist, and allowed Brazil to become one of the world’s fastest-growing economies. Rousseff, a onetime Marxist who was tortured by Brazil’s bygone military dictatorship, won the presidency by vowing to continue Lula’s policies.
The recent discovery of enormous oil deposits in Brazil’s coastal waters may herald ever-greater prosperity. Rousseff nevertheless inherits serious problems of persistent poverty, the ecological threat of timber cutting in the Amazon rain forest, high crime rates, and inflation. But unlike Venezuela’s Chavez or the Castro brothers in Cuba, Lula and Rousseff haven’t turned to anti-American slogans to justify their legitimacy.
America should consult ever more closely with Brazil not only on trade issues such as US cotton subsidies, but on sensitive triangular relations with Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, and Colombia. Brazil is a rising global power, and America will have much to gain if Rousseff provides the same steady, balanced leadership as her predecessor.
