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Economy

After Dilma's Reelection, The Lula Question Looms

Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff edged out reelection, thanks in part to her charismatic predecessor Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. What role will he seek in her second term? Is he preparing to run in 2018?

The duo in 2012
The duo in 2012
Valdo Cruz

BRASILIA — Victory came late in the game, at the very end of the second half. It was a hard-fought victory indeed for incumbent President Dilma Roussef, and it came after a roller coaster Sunday during which her Workers’ Party fears of a defeat felt very real.

The reelection of Rousseff, 66, who outlasted her center-right opponent Aécio Neves, marked the lowest level of support of a leader of the party since 2002. The president preached in her victory speech in favor of “unity, dialogue and change,” a gesture of reconciliation after a particularly vitriolic campaign.

Those promised values of unity and dialogue were two virtues scantily present during Rousseff's first term, even though political allies, trade unionists and entrepreneurs all declared out loud that it was what they wanted from her.

She managed to win a second term despite the fact that much of the Brazilian electorate had voiced the desire for change, and nearly half the country disapproved of Rousseff’s tenure. The center-left president will need to attend to these wishes, which are also shared by a large part of her own party’s electorate.

A comeback kid?

One question however remains: Just how will Rousseff relaunch her presidency? Will she do things her way now that she can claim that victory was hers, and hers alone? Or will she grow even more dependent on her predecessor Lula da Silva, who entered in the homestretch body and soul?

With an eye on maintaining the Workers’ Party project in power, the former president wishes to have a bigger influence on his protege's second term. Brazilian law prevents a president from running for a third consecutive term in office. Meaning that nothing would stop Lula — who served from 2003 to 2011 — from deciding to be a candidate four years from now, to succeed his own successor.

Still, Rousseff should have more freedom to run her government’s project this time around. She did not pay much attention to Lula’s wishes in her first term, so why would she change that now? Maybe she will look to leave a lasting legacy of her own.

The problem for Rousseff is that, contrary to what happened when her political godfather was in the driver's seat, her second term now requires economic adjustments in the face of a looming recession. In Lula’s first term, he was more constrained by economic factors that were beyond his control, and was only able to fully pursue his agenda in the second term.

Rousseff on the other hand was already able to put her mark on her first four years in office. It worked in some areas, but resulted in high inflation and weak growth. She now will need to make fundamental changes to her policy recipe if she wants to avoid jeopardizing her best achievements, including Brazil's low rate of unemployment.

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Society

Genoa Postcard: A Tale Of Modern Sailors, Echos Of The Ancient Mariner

Many seafarers are hired and fired every seven months. Some keep up this lifestyle for 40 years while sailing the world. Some of those who'd recently docked in the Italian port city of Genoa, share a taste of their travels that are connected to a long history of a seafaring life.

A sailor smokes a cigarette on the hydrofoil Procida

A sailor on the hydrofoil Procida in Italy

Daniele Frediani/Mondadori Portfolio via ZUMA Press
Paolo Griseri

GENOA — Cristina did it to escape after a tough breakup. Luigi because he dreamed of adventures and the South Seas. Marianna embarked just “before the refrigerator factory where I worked went out of business. I’m one of the few who got severance pay.”

To hear their stories, you have to go to the canteen on Via Albertazzi, in Italy's northern port city of Genoa, across from the ferry terminal. The place has excellent minestrone soup and is decorated with models of the ships that have made the port’s history.

There are 38,000 Italian professional sailors, many of whom work here in Genoa, a historic port of call that today is the country's second largest after Trieste on the east coast. Luciano Rotella of the trade union Italian Federation of Transport Workers says the official number of maritime workers is far lower than the reality, which contains a tangle of different laws, regulations, contracts and ethnicities — not to mention ancient remnants of harsh battles between shipowners and crews.

The result is that today it is not so easy to know how many people sail, nor their nationalities.

What is certain is that every six to seven months, the Italian mariner disembarks the ship and is dismissed: they take severance pay and after waits for the next call. Andrea has been sailing for more than 20 years: “When I started out, to those who told us we were earning good money, I replied that I had a precarious life: every landing was a dismissal.”

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