Reuters: Campos-Marina still hasn't taken off.

By Jeferson Ribeiro and Maria Carolina Marcello

BRASILIA (Reuters) - Hailed as the big electoral surprise, capable of breaking the polarization between the PT and PSDB this year, the PSB presidential ticket with Eduardo Campos and Marina Silva has not yet shown the expected political strength, and in recent polls, Campos does not reach 10 percent of voting intentions.

In the socialist campaign, however, there is no disappointment with the results of the union between Campos and Marina. The expectation is that from August onwards, with more frequent appearances on television news and with free election broadcast time, it will be possible to make the expected surge.

Meanwhile, the PSB is also considering asking the Electoral Court to compel polling institutes to cite the names of the presidential and vice-presidential candidates in their surveys.

Internal polls by the Socialists indicate that when people learn that Campos and Marina are running together, the ticket's voting intentions rise to 18 percent, and in some regions even to 20 percent.

Before joining forces with Marina, Campos had between 3 and 4 percent of the voting intentions. With the alliance, that support reached 13 percent in some polls this year, but in last week's surveys, voting intentions remained between 8 and 9 percent.

According to political scientists, however, this is not the only obstacle to greater progress for the socialist ticket.

"In the end, they added up weaknesses, not advantages. At the time (of the union announcement) I already thought that Marina wouldn't transfer voting intentions to Eduardo Campos," assessed political scientist Benedito Tadeu Cesar, from the Institute for Social Research and Projects (Inpro). He argues that this transfer is only more likely in local disputes.

Campos, who was a minister in Lula's government and an ally of Dilma, gained Marina's unexpected support for the presidential race last October when the former senator failed to register her party, Rede Sustentabilidade, with the Superior Electoral Court (TSE) and decided to join the PSB. Since then, the two have held numerous events together and indicated that they would be running side-by-side in the election.

Professor David Fleischer, from the University of Brasília, also doesn't believe that this surge is still possible.

"The hope was that Marina would bring the 20 million votes she received in 2010 to Campos. But apparently that's not going to happen," Fleischer told Reuters.

Fleischer believes that the former governor of Pernambuco is waiting for an inheritance that doesn't exist.

"What Eduardo Campos expected was to inherit the 20 million votes. But those 20 million were from people who didn't want to vote for (José) Serra and Dilma," he argued.

In 2010, when she ran for president representing the Green Party, the former Minister of the Environment in Lula's government received approximately 20 million votes in the first round. Despite this, polls did not detect these voting intentions for Marina until the last week before the election.

The fact that they have conflicting proposals in some areas was also pointed out by Benedito Tadeu Cesar as a complication in this alliance. "Campos tried to get closer to agribusiness and the business sector, which has no relation to the environment, and to Marina's traditional discourse, who also vetoed electoral agreements," he argued.

Little known

Socialists believe that the opening of popular committees like the "Eduardo and Marina houses," where voters spontaneously offer their homes to distribute campaign material for the candidates, and some committees in partnership with gubernatorial candidates, will act as an engine to kickstart the socialist campaign.

"There's a false sense of paralysis," a campaign source told Reuters on condition of anonymity.

Former federal deputy Walter Feldman, who is part of the leadership of the socialist campaign and is more closely linked to Marina Silva, said on behalf of the Sustainability Network that there will be thousands of popular committees spread throughout the country.

"It's the voter expressing themselves in their own way, according to their own model and characteristics, and not according to the official model of conventional campaigns," he said.

A day after taking a walk with Marina in Belo Horizonte, Feldman told Reuters that people still don't know who is running for president.

"People don't know anything (yet). They don't know Eduardo. A large portion of the population. Today, I think more than 50 percent don't know Eduardo," he argued.

"We think that when people meet Eduardo, and find out that Marina is his running mate, that should boost his candidacy quite a bit. We think it could reach 18, 20 percent, it could even go up to 30 percent," Feldman stated optimistically.

One of the PSB campaign strategists revealed that an internal survey last week showed that 75 percent of voters do not know that Marina is Campos' running mate.

But overcoming this lack of awareness quickly will be difficult, since the socialists will only have 1 minute and 49 seconds of free airtime in the election. And the trend is that there will be few debates between the candidates in the first round of the election.

The campaign's general coordinator, Carlos Siqueira, said it is too early to pronounce judgment on the Socialist candidacy.

"The campaign is just beginning. We can't, let's say, jump to conclusions and say it didn't pay off, that it didn't grow," he argued.

For political scientists, however, only a major upset can change the current situation. "Barring something unpredictable that affects Dilma or Aécio, change is unlikely," Cesar assessed.

"It was only in 1994, when Lula was far ahead of Fernando Henrique and had the Real Plan, that there was a major turnaround. After that, the phenomenon never repeated itself," Fleischer recalled.

"But hope is the last thing to die," the professor concluded.