International Worker's Day may change Dilma's tone in pre-campaign

Dilma will address the nation in the
International Worker's Day

It seems the recent bad numbers in the electoral surveys have finally hit the pre-campaign of president Dilma Rousseff.  Yesterday the president already changed the strategy and started attacking her opponents. She said during a speech that she does not believe the country will make a step back (meaning she believes she will be reelected). The tone is expected to be even more direct on her TV speech tomorrow on account of the International Worker's Day. She may address her main opponents Aécio Neves from the social democrat PSDB party and Eduardo Campos from the socialist party PSB stating clearly what her government has conquered to the working class in Brazil.

Today O Estado de S. Paulo published pieces of Dilma's government program draft. The text basically makes a direct reference on the benefits that the Workers' Party (PT) made for the country and tries to frame adversaries proposals as threats for the average Brazilian worker. One example is the adversaries defense of the Central Bank's independency. The text asks: "Independence from whom?", implying that without control the Central Bank would damage the workers income gains. It also refers to the past government of PSDB as a privatist government.

Both strategies proved to work well on the last two campaigns of PT (for Lula's reelection and Dilma's election). The question is if this is going to work again, specially when the government proved to be such a bad manager in the energy sector, and when the gains from the policy of increasing salaries and maintaining jobs are being eroded by an inflationary bubble that threats to damage the purchasing power of the country's lower classes for the years to come.

The attempt to frame adversaries as members of "evil market forces" is also a fallacy easy to deconstruct, because her government poured buckets of money to huge transnational companies using subsidized loans from the national development bank, BNDES.

The change of tone reflects the loss of 6,7 percentual points in Dilma's vote intention, from 43,7% to 37%. The president would be still reelected if the elections were held today, but if the trend keeps going, Dilma may loose.