On top of the world: Why Brazil is booming
(NO TOPO DO MUNDO: POR QUE O BRASIL ESTÁ "BOMBANDO")
It is a 100th birthday party in a well-to-do postcode of Sao Paulo, where the house of our journalist host – he and another writer pal are actually each turning 50 – slips graciously down a slope to a terrace and the chatter is nearly all politics. Then the DJ cuts the music in the middle of a samba everyone knows. They reflexively fill in: "Ò coisinha tão bonitinha do papai" – "Oh daddy's beautiful little thing".
Not everything in Brazil is beautiful. Not the slums, or favelas, which ring cities like this one or Rio de Janeiro, or last Saturday's national glee when Argentina – neighbour and perennial rival – crashed out of the World Cup one day after the Brazilian squad's humiliating Dutch demise. ("Que desgraca!" squealed an old man when the stricken face of Diego Maradona filled the TVs in a bar on Sao Paulo's Teodoro Street.)
Yet you cannot spend a day in Brazil without sensing the economic miracles happening here – first quarter growth touched 9 per cent and the helicopter pads atop the skyscrapers of Sao Paulo are buzzing with air traffic again – or hearing of the achievements of its President, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, recently named the world's most influential leader by Time Magazine, in raising the country's profile on the world stage and lifting much of the population out of poverty. The somewhat lefty party-goers were not actually thinking of Lula and Brazil as they sang about daddy and his baby, but they could have been.
The legacy of President Lula, a former lathe operator, is a conversation point if only because the race to succeed him kicks off this week. The constitution bars him running for a third term. While his hand-picked successor in the ruling Workers' Party, Dilma Rousseff, is an electoral virgin (she was his chief-of-staff), polls suggest she will prevail on election day in early October, thwarting the hopes of conservative opposition leader José Serra, a respected former governor of Sao Paulo state.
Fonte: "The Independent" on line
Fonte: "The Independent" on line
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