Dilma Rousseff: Two sides of the same coin

She was once willing to go to jail and face torture in support of Marxism. Today, the heir apparent to the wildly popular Brazilian president, Luiz Inacio da Silva, has embraced the free market and pledged to continue reforms.

Kagan McLeod for The National

Dilma Rousseff is the former Marxist militant who once used the alias "Stella" to agitate against Brazil's military dictatorship in her student days. Like the Coke-bottle glasses she wore back then, she has long since ditched the red rhetoric and embraced the free market.

Indeed, Ms Rousseff has been a key figure in the economic surge Brazil has enjoyed in recent years, fuelled not by the staid old theories of Karl Marx but the sort of capitalism over which she was once willing to be jailed and tortured.

Is the transformation enough to win her the presidency in tomorrow's election? Or has she been a little too keen to embrace the free market? Brazil is, after all, part of a continent where being called "neo-liberal" is considered an insult by many. Her former boss and Brazil's current president, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, thinks she is ready to become the first female president of Latin America's most populous country.

In the end his opinion may be all that matters. "Lula" is one of the most popular leaders in Brazil's history, the charming populist who enjoys an incredible 80 per cent approval rating and has anointed Ms Rousseff, his former chief of staff, as his successor. Dilma and Lula have become a double act. "She is like Nelson Mandela," he has gushed. She returns the compliments. Lula, she says, has given her "the most important opportunities in my life."

Ms Rousseff, 62, has attended ribbon-cutting ceremonies with Mr da Silva to boost her public profile and he has given her control over major national projects, first as his minister for energy and mines and then chief of staff, a job from which she resigned in April so she could campaign for the presidency. The world is watching, and not just because the prospect of a woman becoming the president of a country on a machismo continent is alluring.

In his two terms in office, Mr da Silva has been credited with turning Brazil into the eighth largest economy in the world, a rich and glamorous nation that is gaining respect for more than just a hedonistic beach culture and a powerful national football side. Mr da Silva in recent years has even began reaching out to this region, establishing relationships with Iran and Israel. Indeed, next week Abu Dhabi will host a friendly football game between Iran and Brazil.

Ms Rousseff has positioned herself as the continuity candidate, promising to soldier on with Mr da Silva's reforms. "We are going to follow Lula's path," she said at a campaign rally in September. Her victory may be a boon to feminists, but it is hard to get away from the fact that if she wins it will be because some of Mr da Silva's stardust has settled on her at the ballot box. There is another small matter - she has never actually been elected to office.

That must irritate her rival, Jose Serra, the mayor of Sao Paulo, who has a long and established track record as an elected politician. Mr Serra, however, in a recent poll of 3,000 voters by Vox Populi, had 24 per cent support, compared with Ms Rousseff's 51 per cent. The winning candidate requires a majority of valid ballots cast. Ms Rousseff herself admits she never thought she would become president when growing up in Belo Horizonte, southern Brazil.

"If asked what I wanted to be when I grew up I had the answer at my fingertips: a dancer, trapeze artist or a firefighter. And the president? No way, because at that time Brazil did not even dream of choosing a woman for the presidency." But her childhood was more secure than those of many other children. Her father, Pedro, was a successful Bulgarian immigrant, and her Brazilian mother was a schoolteacher. She remembers her girlhood as days of "riding bikes and climbing trees".

But the middle-class blinkers soon came off. In a rather twee passage on her website, she says she learned early on that the "world was not pink". "Another world, coloured blue, jumped in my eyes when I walked up the hill of one of the largest and poorest slums in the city to do volunteer work with colleagues and nuns from my school". Brazil was, and remains, a country of haves and have-nots. Ms Rousseff was 17 when the military seized power in 1964, and along with her eventual husband, Carlo Araunjo, she became deeply involved in radical underground leftist groups fighting against the new regime.

Her alias was Stella. News reports claim she was linked to an infamous 1969 armed robbery in which $2.5 million was stolen from the Sao Paulo governor's home. The following year she was charged with participating in a militant group and was jailed for three years. Ms Rousseff has said she was frequently tortured with electric shocks. Upon her release she turned her back on hard-left activism, reportedly because she did not think the groups could achieve much, and returned to university to study economics.

When the military government transferred power to civilians in 1985, Ms Rousseff launched a successful career in the public sector. She was once the head of a foundation that carried out research and surveys for the state - not exactly awe-inspiring stuff. But Ms Rousseff established herself as an effective civil servant, albeit one with a fierce temper. "She's extremely demanding," Mr Araunjo, now her former husband, has said. "She's not rude at all, quite the contrary. But people in the public sector aren't used to being asked for results."

The two have remained on good terms, and he even has a "Dilma for President" sticker on his car. After Mr da Silva took office, in 2003, he appointed her minister of mines and energy. In 2005 she became his chief of staff. Her background in the energy sector will come in handy once Brazil begins reaping the benefits of its new-found oil riches. Petrobras, the Brazilian oil giant, discovered three large oil fields four miles beneath the ocean floor in 2007 and hopes 100 billion barrels will be extracted from them.

Ms Rousseff is credited with launching the largest ever housing programme in Brazil, which is expected to build a million homes for the poor. She was also heavily involved in Bolsa Familia, Lula's wildly popular programme that has helped 12 million poor families by giving mothers up to $111 a month for keeping their children in school and taking them to the doctor for regular check-ups. Millions of others have been lifted out of poverty and taken up employment. No wonder Lula is adored.

He could easily win if he ran for a third term, which he cannot do under the constitution. Mr da Silva would have to re-write the law to stand again for public office - something his fellow leaders in Venezuela and Ecuador have not hesitated to do to stay in power. His policies are clearly leftist, but under Mr da Silva's stewardship Brazil has become a friendlier climate for oil and other private companies to do business.

Inflation remains low, and the economic boom fuelled by commodities such as foodstuffs and iron ore, which are in demand in China, has filled the state's coffers. Ms Rousseff has promised the government will spend money prudently and continue financial reforms to make Brazil a more efficient place to do business. However, business analysts have said that the government may take larger ownership of Petrobras under new rules that have come into place regulating the oil industry.

But while these relief programmes and economic changes were lifting Brazil to dizzying new heights of progress, Ms Rousseff remained largely unknown outside Brasilia. In April 2009 she announced she was being treated for cancer. Her illness became a national obsession, with press reports scrutinising even the short brown wig she wore when her hair fell out from the effects of chemotherapy. She was transformed from a little-known administrator in the capital to a national celebrity even though doubts were cast over her ability to run a country with such an illness.

She has assured the public she is healthy and capable. "A flu is more inconvenient. I feel fine." It is one of the few pithy phrases she has spoken since becoming a public figure. Her years as a civil servant mean she gives long-winded answers and has never practised the subtle arts of diplomacy and politics that will be crucial if she becomes president. She lacks Mr da Silva's easy-speaking style and charm, even though his communications chief is also her adviser.

The Lula effect may get Ms Rousseff into office, but after that she will be expected to articulate her own vision of the future of Latin America's powerhouse.