MOSCOW, October 6 (RIA Novosti), Daria Chernyshova – In the event of Aécio Neves winning the presidential election in Brazil on October 26, the foreign policy priorities of the country will change, shifting the focus from the BRICS to the United States and the European Union, a political scientist from the Getulio Vargas Foundation told RIA Novosti on Monday.
“If Neves wins the election, we can expect changes – a return to foreign policy much more linked to the North and the South not being as strong as it was under Dilma's [Rousseff] government,” Sonia Fleury said. “Alignment with the USA and Western Europe are more likely to occur than the push for consolidating the BRICS as an alternative for reaching financial autonomy together,” she noted.
On Sunday, the incumbent president Dilma Rousseff from the Worker’s Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores, PT) and Social Democracy Party (PSDB) candidate Aecio Neves received 41,5 and 33,7 percent of the votes respectively.
“I think that for the PT government the BRICS was an important issue, and I don’t think it will be or it was under a PSDB government – they were much more allied to the United State,” Sonia Fleury continued.
She also noted the role of the economy in electoral preferences.
“It affects [the preferences] in a certain way, because this question is about the priorities of the two parties. The priority for PSDP is to pay the debt and to keep monetary stability, even when it represents increasing unemployment and a fall in real salaries,” Fleury said. “For the present government, the priority was to try to reach economic development with the inclusion of more people in the formal employment market and social benefits, which appears, for some people, as a risk to stability, because of the augmentmentation of public expenditure. And this is the main question up for the discussion in the next two weeks,” Fleury explained.
Rousseff and Neves will face each other in the second round of elections on October 26.
Marina Silva of the Brazilian Socialist Party, garnered slightly over 21 percent of the votes, although was seen as a favorite candidate.
“Now they have to convince those people who voted for Marina [Silva] or did not vote for anyone, that they are better for the country,” Fleury concluded.
Under Rousseff's presidency, unemployment has been lower than under any of her predecessors, at about 5 percent. The minimum wage has risen and the number of undernourished Brazilians has been falling.
However, recently Brazil has seen widespread recession and corruption scandals, as well as mass protests over the quality of public services and the World Cup costs.
