David Axelrod Is Now Advising Brazil's Conservative Presidential Candidate
David Axelrod Is Now Advising Brazil's Conservative Presidential Candidate
By Brian Mier 2 hours ago
An announcement was made last Thursday that David Axelrod had been hired to work on the 2014 Brazilian presidential campaign. According to the Brazilian daily Folha de São Paulo, Axelrod and Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villaraigosa have signed on to help develop an electronic strategy for the candidate Aécio Neves.
The idea of US citizens working on Brazilian election campaigns is nothing new. During the last election, Ben Self, who worked on the Obama campaign, was hired as a consultant for current president Dilma Rousseff. The unusual thing about David Axelrod coming to Brazil is that he is a major player in the US Democratic Party working for the conservative opposition candidate running against a president whom Obama has openly praised in the past.
Aécio Neves is a member of Brazil’s political elite. His father and grandfather were congressmen during the military dictatorship that ruled in the country between 1964 and 1985. During the junta, student associations and opposition political parties were outlawed. Many members of the current ruling PT (Partida de Trabalhadores, or “Workers’ Party”), including current President Dilma Rousseff, were arrested and tortured during this dictatorship. Neves’s grandfather, Tancredo Neves, was handpicked by the military to be the first new civilian president and died mysteriously a few days before the inauguration. Neves was the governor of Minas Gerais state from 2002 to 2010. During this period, he implemented an austerity program called Management Shock and was involved in a series of corruption scandals, most notably an influence-peddling scandal known as Mensalão. Corruption has rarely been an impediment to being elected to public office in Brazil, however, and the charismatic Neves continues to be the main hope for the conservatives in the next presidential election.
It’s difficult to summarize the complicated constellation of Brazilian politics briefly, but Neves is running for president as a multiparty coalition candidate of the two largest parties in Brazil, PSDB and Democratas. Democratas traces its origins back to ARENA, the government political party during the neofascist military dictatorship that ruled Brazil from 1964 to 1985. Former president Fernando Henrique Cardoso founded PDSB, the Social Democrat Party. Cardoso was a progressive intellectual from the 70s who swung sharply to the right after becoming president in 1994. During his eight-year tenure, he followed a monetarist economic prescription handed to him from the IMF and kept inflation down by suppressing wages, maintaining the world’s highest interest rates, and privatizing key sectors of the Brazilian economy.
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