A controversial new campaign ad has made class divisions a key theme in Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff’s battle for re-election in October.
The combative video, released online by Rousseff’s Workers’ Party this week, suggests a deeply polarized campaign ahead in which the incumbent will try to shift attention away from Brazil’s current economic malaise and focus instead on how life improved for the poor over the last decade.
The ad shows a rural family happily driving in a truck loaded with goods. Then they pass a dust-covered, downtrodden version of themselves from the past, walking along the side of the road and carrying heavy boxes.
“We can’t let ghosts from the past come back and take away everything we achieved,” a narrator says.
The ad is designed to appeal to the some 40 million Brazilians who have been lifted from poverty under 12 years of leftist Workers’ Party rule. Many acquired trucks, washing machines and other big-ticket consumer goods for the first time.
Despite that progress, Brazil still has one of the world’s biggest gaps between rich and poor, and class divisions remain a fact of politics and daily life.
The ad drew an immediate rebuke from Rousseff’s leading rival in the election, Senator Aecio Neves of the centrist Brazilian Social Democracy Party (PSDB), who accused the ruling party of “scaring and threatening people in order to try to stay in power.”
reuters
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