BOGOTÁ — When former shoeshine boy Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva was elected Brazil’s president eight years ago, some feared he would lead the country to ruin.
Now, having steered a booming economy through the global crisis and outdueled the U.S. to host the 2016 Olympic Games, the onetime union organizer is preparing to leave office praised by world leaders as disparate as President Barack Obama and Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez.
Brazilians will vote today for a successor to Silva, who will leave a country much more prosperous and more equal than the one he took over in January 2003.
To say Brazilians are happy with him is an understatement: He enjoys an 80 percent approval rating. Nothing so demonstrates Silva’s popularity as the likelihood that his handpicked candidate, former Chief of Staff Dilma Rousseff, will be elected Brazil’s next president despite never having held elective office or giving many clues as to her policy initiatives — other than to continue Silva’s. If elected, she will be Brazil’s first female president.
Despite Silva’s successes, whoever follows him will have plenty of work to do.
Even with the highest tax rates in Latin America, Brazil doesn’t have enough money to fix its roads, ports and railways. Education and health services are weak, and red tape and corruption make Brazil one of the hemisphere’s least-business-friendly nations. High crime, particularly in Rio de Janeiro, host city of the 2016 Olympics, is a continuing blight.
Still, the majority of Brazilians would say that Silva, 64, has been a highly successful president.
