Kotscho: If Marina wins, how will she govern?

247 - Journalist Ricardo Kotscho, on his blog on the R7 portal, mocks Marina Silva's aspirations to run for President in 2014. According to him, validating signatures to create the Rede party is the least of her problems. Read more:

What if Marina wins? How and with whom will she govern?

By Ricardo Kotscho, in Balaio

The least of Marina Silva's problems at the moment is gathering the 491.656 signatures needed to register her Sustainability Network as a political party by October 5th at the Superior Electoral Court.

So far, RS has managed to certify around 200 signatures at electoral offices, out of the approximately 850 it claims to have collected, as Marina reported in a press conference this Sunday, after her name appeared in second place in the Datafolha poll, rising from 23% to 26% and confirming that, even without a party, the former PT senator is so far the main opponent of Dilma Rousseff's candidacy for the presidency.

Let's say that, by some miracle, the vice-leader in the polls manages, in these less than two months remaining before the TSE's deadline, to certify the nearly 300 signatures needed for the party's registration, and can then run for President of the Republic for the second time with a party to call her own.

And let's say that, during the campaign, Marina surpasses Dilma and is elected. That's when her most serious problems would begin. When it was launched, the RS hoped to have at least 20 deputies in this legislature, which would already be almost nothing in a Chamber with 513 parliamentarians. But, so far, only three are truly committed to creating the party, all without much influence: federal deputies Alfredo Sirkis (PV-RJ), Walter Feldman (PSDB-SP) and Domingos Dutra (PT-MA).

In 2010, when she was the Green Party candidate in alliance with other smaller parties, Marina received 20 million votes and took the election to a second round, but now there is no party coalition in sight, not even with her former Green Party partners.

Without political platforms, without strong representation in the states, how and with whom would the former senator assemble her government if elected? There's only one way: she would ally herself with parties like the PMDB, which support anyone, and others of that ilk—the scum of politics that she so vehemently rejects and which has served as her advantage in capturing the votes of the indignant masses from the protests. If that's the case, then why bother winning?

I know many people like me who admire and sympathize with Marina, and might even vote for her, provided she doesn't have a real chance of winning, precisely because governing Brazil requires a minimum of concrete conditions for an administration to stand, not only in terms of political alliances, but also in terms of links with different social movements. It's more difficult to find someone who can understand and explain in a few words what the real objectives of a possible Marina government would be and how it would differ from those we've had so far.

The only visible support for the vice-leader in the polls so far has come from two large companies, one in the cosmetics industry and the other in high finance, in addition to some sectors of the mainstream media, which no longer trust the opposition (PSDB) and are looking for a candidate, anyone capable of defeating the PT.

Marina rose 10 points in the Datafolha poll after the June demonstrations; she was the one who gained the most from the protests "against everything and everyone," but this wasn't enough to capture any political-party-electoral support so far. The party landscape is what it is, whether we like it or not, with about 30 parties, and nothing indicates that new ones will emerge until October, especially since it's possible to import doctors, but not politicians. Unless someone really thinks it's viable to have a country the size of Brazil governed "without parties and without politicians," as some signs proclaimed during the tsunami of protests.