Campos advances on Aécio and launches offensive in Minas Gerais.
The PSB presidential candidate is taking advantage of the PSDB's indecision to advance as the opposition candidate in 2014; cleverly, he keeps his party within President Dilma's allied base, while simultaneously positioning himself as an alternative without the wear and tear associated with the PSDB and the messianic image of the PT; "I talk to everyone, from right to left," says Campos; he has already convinced Caetano Veloso, Paulinho da Força, Dora Kamer...; and he wants Marcio Lacerda, the mayor of Belo Horizonte, to run for governor of Minas Gerais in 2014, to have his own platform in Aécio Neves's home state.
247 – This is something the PSDB party of presidential candidate Aécio Neves didn't expect. It is in Minas Gerais, at an event with a date yet to be set, that the governor of Pernambuco, Eduardo Campos, intends to begin his public pre-campaign events for the 2014 presidential election. With his party, the PSB, in control, unlike Aécio, who has not yet found the necessary unity among the PSDB members to feel secure enough to officially launch his candidacy, Campos is already convincing political analysts that he is miles ahead of Aécio in both candidates' intentions to arrive in 2014 as the main embodiment of the opposition to the Dilma government – even though the PSB is a party tied, until now, to the allied base of the federal administration.
In Minas Gerais, Campos is already coordinating with the mayor of Belo Horizonte, Marcio Lacerda, also from the PSB party, an inauguration event where he can be by his side, associating himself with the project's completion. For 2014, according to the socialist presidential candidate's plans, Lacerda is expected to run for governor of the state, giving him a strong platform for his own presidential campaign. At the same time, by establishing a foothold in the heart of the country's second-largest electoral college, Campos would also thwart Aécio's intention to have Lacerda as his supporter in the presidential race. In the eyes of the PSDB candidate, the mayor of Belo Horizonte is his ally, whom he supported in the election and re-election in the city, but it seems Campos hasn't been informed of this universal truth. And he intends to do things differently.
Campos' current visible advance over Aécio is, of course, due to the governor's own pragmatic stance. "I talk to everyone," he said last week. "From right to left, with everyone." Among the governor's most recent achievements, resulting from this position, are an entity, Força Sindical, which shares hegemony in the labor movement with the CUT linked to the PT, and a nationally prominent figure who is always involved in political issues whenever possible: the Bahian artist Caetano Veloso. "I can't help but think about Eduardo Campos and the political seriousness of Pernambuco," noted Caetano, who used his Sunday column in the newspaper O Globo to profess his faith in the governor.
Initially, the PSDB believed that, given Aécio's and his patron, former president Fernando Henrique's, influence among intellectuals, the non-PT (Workers' Party) segment of the artistic community would support the PSDB by default. But it's becoming clear that this isn't quite the case.
From the Palácio das Princesas (Princesses' Palace), Campos has been receiving visits from politicians from all over Brazil, interested in learning about his plans. His strategy is far from naive. A month ago, when the vice-president of the PSB, Roberto Amaral, declared that the party was ready to break with the government, Campos immediately went into action to affirm that the electoral calendar was already far ahead of schedule. "Before politics, there is a lot of work to be done," he said, throwing cold water on the situation and appearing as a man concerned with objective issues rather than personal ambitions.
Maintaining his personal friendship and political loyalty to former President Lula, Campos, at the same time, shows no hurry to have a meeting with Lula himself, which has been postponed since last year. The conversation, after all, could be definitive, and it is not in the Pernambuco governor's interest, at this time, to cut ties with the federal government. This, moreover, would cost dozens of positions in the federal machine to the elite militants of the PSB. Why fight before the time is right, he asks? In his favor, in this sense, is also the fact that, even while supporting the government, the PSB is increasingly taking on the characteristics of an opposition party. Not the opposition that says 'nothing that is there is any good', as the PSDB tries to do in its own way, but one that, being an ally, can recognize qualities in the very popular Dilma government and is able to appear to the public with a positive agenda, to fix what is wrong and preserve what is successful.
With his cleverness, Campos is proving himself, so far, to be much more like a true Minas Gerais native than Aécio in saying that he isn't, but is, a candidate.