Brazil’s Man of Action

A Arte da Política: A História que Vivi
(The Art of Politics: The History That I Lived)
By Fernando Henrique Cardoso
699 pages, Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 2006 (in Portuguese)

There are those who govern. There are those who study politics and write about those who govern. And then there are those few, like Fernando Henrique Cardoso, the former president of Brazil, who do both. A university professor who had gained international recognition as the foremost development sociologist by the time his country’s military dictatorship banned him from teaching in 1969, Cardoso is hardly the first intellectual turned politician. He is fairly unique, however, in his choice to apply the tools of his former academic trade to analyze his own political legacy.

The result is A Arte da Política: A História que Vivi (The Art of Politics: The History That I Lived), a fascinating inside story of his rise to power and the nine and a half years in which he tried, first as finance minister and later as president, to transform Brazil into a stable democracy willing to face the inequities of its society and the inefficiencies of its economy. The Art of Politics is far from a self-glorifying political memoir. It’s a detailed and reasoned analysis about reforms made or postponed under severe pressure and the rationale behind them. It reveals a leader guided by a clear sense of purpose and a deep knowledge of the society he was charged to govern at a time of profound political and economic transformation on the global scene.

A good social scientist who once confessed to overanalyzing his actions while in power, Cardoso dictated his thoughts and recorded hundreds of hours of conversations in his executive office. They were later transcribed and stored at his presidential library in downtown São Paulo. It’s a rare wealth of information that serves both the author and the reader well. The book is essentially Cardoso’s case study of his own administration, having used this information to check reports of events against what he was thinking about those events as they were unfolding.

And no issue shaped events more during his presidency than the country’s volatile economy. By the time Cardoso ascended to Palácio do Planalto on Jan. 1, 1995, the imperatives of globalization had already forced Brazil to abandon the inward model of development the country had followed for more than 400 years. The former social scientist now led a country whose elites had resigned themselves to living forever with inflation, a country that, for its entire history,
"lurched from one crisis to another, mainly because of our refusal to follow rules," he writes. "[This] refusal … was, in reality, just another product of our deeply unjust society."

Stabilizing the economy — and society in general — was a tall order. The devaluation of Brazil’s new currency, the real, would dominate these efforts during his tenure. It’s a subject he rightly lingers on. As finance minister in the early 1990s, he had adopted the Plano Real, a strategy to do away with the inflation that had plagued Brazil for decades and that catapulted him to the presidency. As president, Cardoso found that the plan was much harder to implement because events outside Brazil — the Asian and Russian financial crises, to name two — sometimes blocked the road to reform.

By 1998, though he had cleaned up the banking system and consolidated some public debt, he had made little progress on the fiscal front. Cardoso was eventually forced to float the currency and, with support from U.S. President Bill Clinton, sought the help of the International Monetary Fund to avoid a financial meltdown. It was a complicated and risky move. At the time, the real was a currency with a five-year history of stability. "The fear that we could fall back into the inferno of hyperinflation tormented us," Cardoso writes. The result? Although executed rather inelegantly, the move proved to be the first successful transition from a fixed to a floating currency exchange regime among developing nations.

But the former leader doesn’t deny his doubts about the depth of the transformations his government brought to Brazil. He lists the many tasks yet to be performed to modernize the country and denounces the return of massive corruption under his successor, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, whose Workers’ Party has, he charges, "crushed the country’s soul." His skepticism has been reinforced by new suspicions of economic mismanagement, the collapse of ethics among public officials, and the spectacular implosion of Brazil’s role as a regional leader.

There are mea culpas, too, including his decision to invest the considerable political capital he still had in 1997 to amend the constitution so he could run for a second term, instead of focusing on his reform agenda. Controversial to this day, the move was then supported by nearly two thirds of the public and the bulk of the political class. "I think it would be better if there was an alternative other than reelection," he said at the time. "[I]t may be even presumptuous on my part, but I searched [for an alternative], talked to the parties, [and] nobody accepted other names. I don’t know if I am rationalizing, but it is certain that for me, personally, it is not good to remain four more years [as president]." Despite this personal reluctance, Cardoso’s candidacy for a second term helped to instill some discipline in his political base and secure approval for some reforms.

History will tell if Cardoso’s second term was the right thing for Brazil. More admired abroad than at home these days, the former president registers low ratings when compared to the current one. According to a recent CNI-Ibope poll, only 18 percent of Brazilians believed Cardoso’s administration did a better job in office than Lula’s, despite a series of corruption scandals that paralyzed Lula’s administration for more than a year.

The growing doubts about Cardoso’s legacy suggest that his reservations about running for reelection were well founded. As president, Cardoso was keenly aware of Brazil’s position in the international arena. Indeed, ever the globalist, he even released a simultaneous autobiography written for an American audience. Much shorter than the political memoirs of his eight years in power, the work is an enticing history of Brazil in the 20th century.

In both the American and Brazilian books, the former president suggests that what was accomplished during his presidency was too little, too late. "As much as we have done, as much as Brazil has changed, the world has not stopped and, looking around, one does not know for sure the relative degree of progress."

That his task was only partially completed makes the Brazil story under Cardoso a sobering reminder of the obstacles most countries in Latin America face in catching up with the fast-emerging nations of Asia and Central Europe. Indeed, in comparing Brazil to China and India, he acknowledges that the country is losing ground.

As Cardoso trains his sociologist’s eye on Brazil’s current situation, he finds much to criticize — not only about the path that his successor has led the country down, but also the real and perceived regrets of his own stunted reforms for Brazil. Yet the former president’s special capacity to analyze his own experience of his time in government hardly left him bitter. "Despite many limitations and the mistakes that I may have committed, … I remember those eight intense years with a sense of mission accomplished." Perhaps now, with The Art of Politics, Cardoso will persuade his fellow citizens who remain unconvinced of the legacy he left behind.