Heloísa Helena and So-called Third Parties

Meet the third-place candidate in the Brazilian elections. I did. Her name is Heloísa Helena and she is one of the senators who was expelled from the PT during the first year of Lula´s presidency for going against the party line on some critical votes, most notably pension reform. She really made her name, however, when she cried on the senate floor. Since then, Heloísa Helena became one of the founders of the PSOL which might be described as the workers´ wing of the Workers´ party if only they were attracting the workers and not the old socialists from the PT.

In order to attract the left, the party (which is admittedly still very young) will have to concentrate more on populism and its image. Heloísa Helena is an interesting spokeswoman for this image. On television, she has her severe ponytail and is portrayed as kind of an emotional woman both in her activities on the senate floor and on the campaign trail. The Folha in the last few days noted that she was having "woman problems" on Sunday and a blog in the same newspaper sayed that she had blown her top over pressing questions about taxes. My sense is that they are trying to undermine her as a candidate by pointing to "feminine" responses to issues and it makes me wonder what woman could run a serious campaign--the alternative would be what happened to Marta Suplicy, who was seen as hard, aloof and elitist.

I must say that in person, Heloísa Helena is very warm and nice (she is, after all, a nurse); she certainly has potential to appeal to the masses if only she can meet them and get beyond the press. The press, however, will never be her friend. The conservative media outlets (Globo, Estadão) favor Alckmin while left-leaning media sources are worried about the PSOL managing to split the progressive vote not only in the presidential election but in congressional elections; the rise of the party as embodied by Heloísa Helena could spell difficulty for the PT. Interestingly, at the moment, she seems to be undermining Alckmin every bit as much as she is undermining Lula; the polls show that she is taking intellectual elite votes from the "main" opposition candidate.