MARINA SILVA was born into a family of rubber-tappers in Acre, a state in Brazil's Amazon region. She survived hunger, severe illnesses and hard childhood labour to become one of the founders of the movement of environmentalists and activists for workers' rights. In the 1970s and 1980s they organised the opposition to the big landowners who kept rubber-tappers in indentured servitude and cleared rainforest for large-scale ranching. Since being elected a senator for Acre in 1994 she has ploughed on in Brazilian politics, acting as environment minister under Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Brazil's president from 2003 to 2010, before stepping down in protest at pressure to weaken environmental laws, and then leaving the president's Workers Party (PT) altogether.
As the Green Party's presidential candidate in 2010 Ms Silva received 19.6m votes, putting her in third place. Recent opinion polls have found 16-22% support for her as a candidate in next year's presidential elections, even though she is currently without a political party. That puts her second in the running behind the incumbent, Dilma Rousseff of the PT.
Since 2011 Ms Silva has been working to set up a new party, Rede Sustentabilidade (Sustainability Network). Brazil's electoral laws require Rede to collect 492,000 signatures backing its formation and have them authenticated by notaries before it can be registered. Unless this is done by October 5th—exactly a year before the next elections—the party will not be eligible to field candidates, putting Ms Silva's political future in doubt. Though it has managed to collect more than 900,000 signatures, only 450,000 had been authenticated by September 27th, when The Economist's São Paulo bureau chief spoke to Ms Silva in her private office in Brasília about Rede's programme for government—and its race against the clock. An edited transcript of the conversation follows.
The Economist: Let's talk about the Sustainability Network, the new party you are trying to set up. How did you end up less than a week from the deadline of October 5th still lacking tens of thousands of the necessary signatures of support validated by the public notaries?
Marina Silva: We collected 910,000 signatures in order to arrive at the 492,000 required for the party to be registered. Unfortunately most of the public notaries missed their deadlines for validating signatures—there's a legal deadline of 15 days. Half the signatures were held beyond the legal deadline. Even so, we now have more than 450,000 signatures certified. And 95,000 more were invalidated illegally, without any justification. What exactly happened is for the electoral courts to judge. We will have 550,000 signatures at least if they undo that wrong, and accept those signatures. We have a presence in every state and in the federal district, in more than 3,000 municipalities. We have more than 12,000 volunteers collecting signatures. We sent more than 668,000 signatures to the public notaries within the legal timeframe.
This is a party that isn't just a name; it has support. But obviously there was something happening on the notaries' side that the electoral courts will have to judge. Some states had rejection rates that were outliers. The rate of rejection of signatures nationally excluding São Paulo and Brasília was 19%; São Paulo and Brasília pushed it to 25%, with São Paulo state having a rejection rate of 35%, hitting more than 50% in the ABC Paulista [an industrial region in which the PT is very strong]. Perhaps the electoral courts can work out what happened, because this atypical behaviour would make the registration of our party unviable.
What is your Plan B?
There isn't one. I only have a Plan A. I am sure that the ministers of the electoral court will base their decision on the facts, on the evidence. I have no reason to distrust this. I really believe that we will get the party registered: we've fulfilled all the legal requirements. It is undeniable that we have societal support. It can't be that we end up having to pay the price of some public notaries illegally rejecting signatures.
The results of the 2010 elections are also an indication of societal support, surely?
We don't disagree with having legal requirements for the foundation of a new party. What we cannot accept is an action, deliberate or not, that stops us from fulfilling them. And that's why we are turning to the court.
Why didn't you start earlier?
We started at the right time. We started as a movement, which needed to gain depth and breadth before it could form a political party. You don't just start by creating a political party—political parties start with society. We started in 2011, and took the decision to create a political party on February 16th, 2012 and since then we have managed to get more than 900,000 signatures in support of the party's creation. It's an ethical stance—not to create a party until you have the necessary societal support.
Today yet another opinion poll shows that support for you as president is falling from the high point it reached after the protests. What happened?
I will say to you what I always say about opinion polls: it is still early days. Voters are still making up their minds. And I have a long history with opinion polls. In 2010 the polls were giving me 9%. In the final week, 15%. I got 19.6%. In my first election to Senate the polls put me in last place; I came first with 75% of the votes. So, the polls at best reflect a moment and don't always manage to capture the real intentions of the voters.
A colleague of mine, a former Brazil correspondent, interviewed you in 2010 and wrote that you were one of those rare politicians who seems "too principled to be thrown into an electoral dogfight in a giant democracy". Some Brazilians, perhaps, agree, because you do have this position of being an ethical voice in Brazilian politics, and some Brazilians at least may think that it would be better to have a leader who knows how to take part in that dogfight. Honestly—do you want to be president of a country, or do you want to be an ethical voice who doesn't have to compromise?
I see politics as service. This service could be as president, it could be as a teacher, a senator, a government minister, a citizen. When Lula became president and invited me to be his environment minister many people said: "You are a reference point for environmentalism; if you go into government you won't have the support you need and it will damage you." But I thought, if I don't take this opportunity to put into practice the ideas I believe in, perhaps I'm not really such a reference point after all.
And soon after entering the environment ministry, we succeeded in perhaps one of the most important environmental measures taken in the history of Brazil: a plan to combat deforestation. It brought deforestation down by more than 80% since then, saving more than 4 billion tonnes of CO2 emitted. We also managed to create 24m hectares of new conservation areas, and many other strategic actions against predatory deforestation.
There have been forces attempting to overturn that plan, but they haven't succeeded. Sadly, the current government changed the law [the Forest Code, which governs land use in all of Brazil and is strictest in forested areas] and deforestation is now picking up again.
You stepped down from government at a moment of high tension between your environmental priorities and more developmentalist currents within government.
My departure was a political act. It put pressure on the government not to overturn or weaken the plan to combat deforestation. I left at a moment that there was pressure from the agriculture ministry, from the then-governor of Mato Grosso, Blairo Maggi [a big soya producer], to try to revoke those measures.
But you wouldn't be able to step down as president in some moment of high tension…
If I had stayed, they would have won. My departure was the strongest possible criticism of what was happening, and it created public pressure, both nationally and internationally, and gave President Lula the strength he needed to oppose those seeking to weaken environmental laws. My aim wasn't to keep my job, it was to keep to my plan. It was an ethical choice. Political decisions always have to be guided by ethical decisions.
In some similar moment of pressure in the presidency, how would you deal with it? Turn to the streets?
I am not yet in the position of a president! But if you govern according to a programme, and you have a strategic agenda, you can't ignore society in implementing that agenda. You can't think that this is something you can "do to" society without having created that agenda together with society. The big problem we are facing right now is that there is a complete separation between a society that wants a better Brazil, and politicians who imagine that it is their prerogative to do things for society in whatever way they want. That they can, in their position of representatives, replace the represented. Representative democracy doesn't mean excluding the voices of those who are represented.
Rede clearly has a strong focus on the environment, but governing a country requires policies in many other areas, for example the economy.
Our guiding principle is sustainable development. That is regarding not just the environment but also everything to do with the model of social and economic development. In this model you are conscious of having to preserve the basis of your development, which is natural resources.
In Brazil that necessarily means big investments in education, technology and innovation, so that we can convert our comparative advantages into competitive advantages. Brazil is the country with the most sunshine in the world, and at a moment when we are searching for sources of energy to substitute for fossil fuels, that is a big comparative advantage. The problem is that up till now, unfortunately—and this government is no different—governments haven't valued this important source of energy. Brazil also has enviable hydropower resources, and if the social, environment and cultural impacts are well handled, this potential should be used too. There is a huge potential in wind power and biomass. We have a large amount of land available for agriculture, the technology to double our output without cutting down even one more tree, and 11% of the world's fresh water.
Brazil in the 21st century has everything it needs both to preserve these assets and to use them to give dignified lives to all its citizens. It is essential, though, that we invest in infrastructure to become more productive. Today we lose around 30% of our agricultural production because of logistical problems, including lack of storage and poor transport links.
One of the things that makes it difficult to build infrastructure in Brazil is the cumbersome process of getting environmental licences. How would you deal with this difficulty?
I don't agree that environmental licensing disrupts things. The processes can be made smoother and quicker, and it is not reasonable that we spend billions and billions on infrastructure without investing a single centavo on creating a licensing system that matches the size of these investments. But anyone who knows the sector knows that with an increase in the number of technical staff and the strengthening of the directorates it is perfectly possible to speed things up.
The processes themselves don't need simplifying?
Many things do need adjusting. But many things that people call bureaucracy are real problems that do need solving. You cannot say it is bureaucracy to have to find a solution for local indigenous populations. Or to have to protect biodiversity. Or ensure that when you build a reservoir for a hydroelectric dam you don't increase malaria by increasing mosquito populations. What we want is a licensing system that encapsulates both aspects: the need for strategic investments and for social, environmental and cultural protection. When these aren't taken care of it causes legal uncertainty and delay, because it means the public prosecutor's office steps in and halts work. When they are, things move forward.
On the economic front, Brazil has a big political challenge. Our politics are very backward, and that threatens the economic and social advances that we have managed in recent years. There is an excessively patronage-focused vision of politics, above all within political parties. The way government jobs and ministries are shared out between the parties in the governing coalition in order to maintain their support is unsustainable. We now have nearly 40 ministries, and it has pushed up the cost of government.
It has made it excessively interventionist too, because to keep up its approval ratings the government presents itself as the great provider of absolutely everything. That leads to a mistaken vision of how public and private sector should interact. The decision to auction infrastructure concessions was taken really late, and once it was taken the government continued with a very controlling attitude, including regarding the rate of return on private investments, and that put off many investors. It then tried to change its attitude in order to get the programme going, but even so there is still an environment of mistrust.
What would you do differently?
The important thing is to have clear rules that are the same for everybody. To create an environment where everyone can compete on a level playing field. If you establish clear criteria regarding quality and access, the private sector will find the way to provide the goods and services with the necessary profit.
That's a very orthodox vision.
Well, the vision of a state that provides everything is orthodox for one segment of Brazilian society too! But the idea that you can have quality, access and the presence of the state where the private sector is unable to provide, this isn't classic orthodoxy. It is a vision of the state that is neither the provider of everything, nor the state that is just a regulator, where the market controls everything. Because that is not right either.
The crisis in the United States and elsewhere had to do with this belief that the market would be able do everything, and when it couldn't the state had to step in. I think there is another way to move forward, between the two extremes, in which the state is neither the provider of everything nor a mere watchdog, but a mobilising force, integrating the best of the market and society as a whole in order to face the great challenges ahead.
This sounds a lot like the "Third Way" of a previous prime minister of the United Kingdom, Tony Blair.
I think it goes beyond that in its emphasis on sustainability as the foundation for everything. That brings long-term thinking into the short time horizons of politics.
Do you think Brazilian politics is particularly short-termist?
I think short-termism is a problem in politics the world over. For example, at the Rio+20 meeting [a global environmental summit in Rio de Janeiro last year] countries decided to switch resources away from solving the environmental crisis towards solving the economic crisis, even though the former is more serious. It is not the right time to be thinking only of the next elections, not in Brazil, not in Britain, not in the United States. It is the time to be doing what is needed now but also to be thinking of coming generations.
It is my impression that politics in Brazil is particularly short-termist and venal, with the well-known toma lá, dá cá ["give-and-take", as Brazilians call the process whereby the executive trades jobs and pork-barrel spending in return for legislative support]. How would you deal with this more traditional side of Brazilian politics while trying to maintain your reputation as an ethical voice in politics?
I think it would be hard to answer that for anyone doing that sort of politics. But when you think of a country with the potential of Brazil, that since the start of this century has managed to break long-standing paradigms and create new ones—how can it be possible to keep doing that sort of politics?
So the question is, how to move to a new political model? I see two routes. The first is to have a programme, not mere pragmatism; a plan for the country, not just for staying in power. A strategic vision for the next 20, 30, 40 years, where your goals have been agreed with society and you are fully committed to them. Then it is society that governs. This allows you to escape from this predatory way of doing politics.
In a democracy, alternation of power is very healthy, and so we are working on a second agenda above that one, which is a historic political realignment. We already regained our democracy [Brazil was governed by a military dictatorship between 1964 and 1985, with full democracy only restored in 1989]. We managed to consolidate it, but sadly governments were still obliged to govern with the detritus that remained from the "Old Republic" [this is the name usually given to the period from 1889 to 1930, but Ms Silva uses it in a broader sense to mean an old-fashioned clientelist style of politics]. Both the PT [which has held the presidency since 2003] and the PSDB [Party of Brazilian Social Democracy, Brazil's biggest opposition party, which governed from 1994 to 2002] ended up hostage to the Old Republic. But now is the moment for a historic realignment, in which the "New Republic" starts to govern the country.
So over and above developing a programme for government, if the Sustainability Network comes into being and its candidate is elected, it would seek support from the best parts of the PT and the PSDB. Because they are the New Republic, and have been called upon by society, which took to the streets to demand this of them, to finally put to rest the logic of the Old Republic, which has no support from society any more.
But the Old Republic is still very strong.
Yes, but the Brazilian people are stronger. It was the people who brought about the return to democracy [in 1985 the military dictatorship stepped aside after massive street demonstrations]. It was the people who made it possible to regain economic stability, in a very difficult period [Brazil conquered hyperinflation in 1993 with the Real Plan]. It was the people who pushed for the policies that rescued 30m people from extreme poverty in the past decade. And it was the people who took to the streets in June to demand a new political alignment in Brazil.
That for you then was the message of the streets—that it is time to stand up to the Old Republic?
The message of the protests of June was that people want a better Brazil. It is not just a Brazilian phenomenon—all over the world, societies are demanding a better quality of political representation, and greater space to participate. The internet is a powerful tool that allows us to maintain contact in real time. If people thought that the internet would revolutionise business, science, technology, culture and spirituality, but politics would continue the same old way—I can't go along with that. Politics is changing and will change more. People are demanding a better world, one in which the goods and services provided by government or private initiative fulfil social and environmental ends.
Is it fair to say that the government misunderstood the message of the streets, then? That it thinks what was being demanded was more consumption and higher salaries, in other words more of the same?
I think there was a very widespread belief that once the basics of life were provided for—food, a bit of education that still left much to be desired in terms of quality—that this was enough. But the new middle classes are demanding more than bread. They want high quality in education, and in other public services. The demonstrations showed that though there have been improvements inside the home, when people look for a school, or for transport, they don't find the quality that they would like. That is what we are hearing: a multiplicity of voices demanding quality in education, transport, health care and so on.
Some people say that that is unfocussed, but that is not right. What unites these demands is that they are all for a better Brazil, a better world. Each person, in expressing this, starts with the need that is closest, certainly, but it shouldn't be understood as an individualist, exclusive demand. Someone who demands a "FIFA standard" hospital isn't demanding that for himself alone, but for everyone. [June's protests coincided with the Confederations Cup, a dry run for next year's World Cup, which Brazil will host, and many marchers carried placards demanding public services and infrastructure of the same high standard as the stadiums Brazil is constructing to satisfy FIFA, football's global governing body.] When someone says they want to be able to get around their city, they are not saying that for just themselves, but for everyone. Demands for safety aren't for one person, they are for everyone. Brazilian society is learning very rapidly that instead of wanting to live in a bubble, people want an ecosystem that allows everyone to flourish.
What are the concrete steps that need to be taken to improve, say, education?
I agree with the recent decision of Congress to move to earmarking 10% of GDP for education. It is correct, because it is a huge challenge to transform our comparative advantages into competitive advantages, and without quality education it just won't be possible. It is also important because to develop we have to start longer-term planning. Investments need to continue; we have to stop this business of the government changing and the priorities changing with it. In health, education, infrastructure. That continuity is needed too for business confidence.
Where does this lack of business confidence come from?
When the whole time you are having to replace ministers because of corruption, when you have the public banks deciding who gets access to credit, without clear criteria decided in Congress, even though you are talking about public money, it creates a lack of confidence. When inflation threatens to rise above the top of the targeted range, when the macroeconomic rules are weakened, it creates a lack of confidence.
Brazil has extremely high taxes for an upper-middle-income country. Do you think that taxes need to go up further to accommodate new demands, or is it a matter of shifting priorities within the total spent?
The quality of public spending needs to be improved a lot. Today, taxpayers know that they are bearing a heavy burden, but when they look to receive the benefits, good infrastructure, hospitals and schools aren't there. Part of the extra spending on education will come from the pré-sal [Brazil's vast ultradeep-water oilfields, discovered in 2007 and not yet in full production]. It is a tough challenge: today we cannot do without oil, which is a fossil fuel and very damaging, but it is essential to use these riches to invest in technology that will allow us to replace it by renewable sources. We should use these resources both to improve education and to lay a sustainable foundation for energy generation for the long term.
Surely the pré-sal resources won't be enough to double spending on education. And it's not just better schools Brazilians want: they want better health care and transport too. Brazil hasn't yet reached the point of making choices: it wants more of everything. That is understandable, but at some point spending priorities need to switch, it can't just be more of everything.
Well, greater efficiency would help a lot—and blocking off the drain of public corruption would help a lot too. Right now the labour ministry is being investigated for diverting 400m reais ($178m) illegally, and this is a constant in Brazil, all the time we are replacing ministers for such things. We need to create mechanisms that lessen corruption and control public spending better. These days it is perfectly possible to put all the data online in real time, open access, so society can oversee what is being spent. If we are spending a big part of the budget on creating more and more ministries, more and more public jobs to accommodate political allies, it is really wasteful. Spending has to become more efficient so that we can spend on better services and investment.
But tackling corruption goes beyond control and oversight: you need to end impunity. When those who are considering breaking the rules see a very low chance that they will ever be punished, it increases the number willing to take that chance. When you have a greater certainty of getting caught and being punished you will have a very significant drop in corruption. Transparency also inhibits corruption: when you know you are being watched not just by the usual government watchdogs, such as the public prosecutor's office, but by society, this will help too.
But corruption will only be cut when tackling it stops being seen as the government's responsibility and starts being seen as society's. It was only when slavery was seen as a societal issue and not an issue for government, that it was ended. It was the same with Brazil's dictatorship, and then economic instability, and after that dire poverty: these were finally dealt with once they stopped being seen as issues for government to resolve and were adopted by society. It will be the same with corruption, and it has already started. Those who think that things will just return to normal are fooling themselves. It'll never be the same after the protests.
That is a pretty optimistic vision.
It is a persistent vision! It comes from my experience: 25 years ago I was with Chico Mendes with rubber-tappers in Xapuri in Acre, fighting for their survival and the survival of the rainforest. We were a handful of researchers and a handful of rubber-tappers and indigenous people. Now, the most recent research shows that 95% of Brazilians are willing to pay more for foods that don't damage the rainforest. This didn't come about because of either optimism or pessimism, but because of persistence.
Brazil has barely grown for the past few years. What happened—did the government get things wrong?
My friend the economist Eduardo Giannetti always says that at one point global financial markets became excessively optimistic about Brazil and now they are excessively pessimistic. There certainly are plenty of problems that need to be faced up to honestly. But we don't depend only on government actions; we are in a globalised world. What happens in Europe or the United States has an impact here.
But on the other hand, I am a critic of some government actions. We have neglected the importance of running a big primary surplus [previous Brazilian governments generally directed more than 3% of GDP to repayments of debt principal and interest; since 2011 that has fallen]. We have been careless with the inflation target [Brazil's Central Bank is supposed to use interest rates to keep inflation close to 4.5%, within a 2.5-6.5% tolerance band, but since mid-2011 rates have been cut even when inflation has been bumping against the 6.5% limit]. The top of the tolerance band has come to be treated as the target itself. At a moment of huge opportunities, we didn't do the strategic investments needed in education, technology and physical infrastructure and now we have to swim against the tide. When the crisis came in 2009 the correct stimulus measures were taken [the government pumped cheap credit into the economy via public banks and supported local consumption by slashing sales taxes]. But when the economy started to recover we should have started to withdraw stimulus measures, and that wasn't done.
It is wrong to blame everything on the government when global conditions play a part—but on the other hand, governments need to learn the same lesson. When things are going well, it is all because of their policies; when things are going badly, it is all to do with external conditions! If we don't stop being complacent about our mistakes, we will never learn the lessons we should from them, or how to avoid repeating them.
(Photo credit: Leo Cabral)

 Bron: http://www.economist.com/blogs/americasview/2013/09/interview-marina-silva-0?fsrc=scn/tw_ec/almost_out_of_time