Votes for Sale

For all its self-congratulatory slaps on the back,
the Brazilian marketeering establishment is not without
its sins. Some even believe that it's
time to doubt its own hype.

Francesco Neves

From 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. on October 6, Brazilians will be going to the polls to choose a new president, after eight years of Fernando Henrique Cardoso, who, according to the Constitution cannot be reelected a second time. If necessary, there will be a second round on October 27. Since in Brazil, the vote is not only a right but most of all an obligation very few souls will skip their duty. Three months before the elections there are four main contestants: Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (the front-runner opposition candidate), José Serra (the President's choice), Ceará's ex-governor Ciro Gomes and Rio's former governor Anthony Garotinho. To a less attentive observer, however, it seems sometimes that the candidates are only two and that their names are José Eduardo (Duda) Mendonça and Nizan Guanaes, both marketing wizards.

Mendonça has dramatically changed the way Da Silva dresses and presents himself. He is the presidential candidate's marketing consultant. This is the fourth consecutive time that the former union leader runs for the presidency, always coming as a strong second. It started in the 1989 election when Lula lost to Fernando Collor de Mello, who ended up being impeached on corruption charges, in 1991. Then, twice the PT (Partido dos Trabalhadores—Workers' Party) candidate lost to the sitting president, Fernando Henrique Cardoso. Before Mendonça's intervention, Lula had appealed to his rough and unrefined charm, wearing bargain clothes and an uncultivated beard. Duda has pared down Lula's beard, furnished his wardrobe and toned down the candidate's candor, rage and rhetoric.

Guanaes took the challenge to sell former Health Minister, José Serra, an uninspired and non-charismatic politician who was a senator from São Paulo before joining Cardoso's cabinet as Health Minister. Despite all the government machinery in his favor Serra has been rising very slowly in the polls, never threatening Lula's leadership, who has maintained an advantage of 20 percentage points over his opponent.

Guanaes and Mendonça are celebrities in their own right. They have won innumerable prizes for their advertising companies. To add a savory twist in this dispute, Guanaes and Mendonça are two Baianos (from northeastern Bahia state) who made good in the South of the country and Guanaes once was Mendonça's employee.

Mendonça better known simply as Duda, was already a well-known publicist when young Guanaes—call him Nizan—knocked on his agency's door looking for a job. Nizan would soon buy his master's business, the DM9 advertising agency, and transfer it to São Paulo. While Guanaes went on to become an internationally known and much-awarded ad professional, Mendonça has been dedicating most of his time to political campaigns and consulting for political candidates.

Is this a dispute between creature and creator? This is a notion that Guanaes tries to dispel. "Beyond the fact that he is the biggest name of the Brazilian political marketing, Duda Mendonça is my professional father." That's what Guanaes wrote in the preface of Casos e Coisas (Cases and Things) Mendonça's book released last year.

Right, Left and in Between

For Mendonça, Guanaes, and Paulo de Tarso da Cunha Santos, who constitute the Holy Trinity of Brazil's political campaign gurus, their main product in the few weeks before the elections will be politicians. Nobody seems to worry that like politicians they change their allegiance according to the winds of opportunism.

Duda, now in charge of the presidential campaign of leftist leader Lula, is the same who in 1992 shaped the campaign of right wing Paulo Salim Maluf, who ended up winning as mayor of São Paulo, South America's largest city, with a population of more than 10 million people. Maluf has been a fierce foe of Lula and the Workers' Party and in 2000, in a particularly mean and dirty campaign, lost the São Paulo mayoralty to PT's candidate, Marta Suplicy.

A good adman does not make public the products he favors. Pressed to tell whom he is going to vote for, Duda says, "I'm too intelligent a marketeer to reveal such a thing." Nizan is also very reticent. When asked to reveal his real political preferences he says, "When people ask me this kind of question I quote Cacilda Becker (actress and stage producer, 1921-1969), "Don't ask me for something free that I have to sell." Does he lean to the left or to the right? "I'm for the middle," he answers.

Guanaes and Mendonça don't miss an opportunity to throw jabs at each other. During the recent São Paulo Maxivoto, an international meeting on marketing—among the participants there were Bill Clinton's marketeer, Dick Morris and George W. Bush's media adviser Mark McKinnon—Guanaes made fun of Mendonça, who said he had accepted to work in Lula's campaign because the PT candidate had matured. "I have also matured in the last few year," said Guanaes, "but this doesn't mean that I'm prepared to run the country."

On that same occasion, Duda complained that Nizan was spreading jokes about the PT, comparing the party to the Taliban. Duda also criticized those who are questioning Lula for showing up always wearing suit and tie: "Before, people would blast Lula because he didn't dress well and was too radical. Now they vilify him because he is dressing nicely and talking properly."

"I would never ask a politician to change glasses or the way he dresses," answered Nizan, nitpicking on Duda, who in 1992 convinced candidate Paulo Maluf to change the glasses, which the marketeer considered too heavy.

Leonel Brizola, president of the leftist PDT (Partido Democrático Trabalhista—Democratic Labor Party) and on the ticket with Lula as vice-president in the 1998 elections, says in his feisty style that Lula has become practically a traitor: "If I met Lula in the street today I wouldn't recognize him, as much as he has changed his way of dressing, the impeccable hair. He barely has a beard these days, he trimmed so much that it became a downy beard. He now has an affected tone of voice and his language became too sophisticated."

Paulo de Tarso da Cunha Santos, the man who created the memorable Lula Lá (Lula There)—the 'there' being the Palácio do Planalto, the Brazilian White House—jingle for the 1989 presidential campaign is now taking care of the PSDB (Partido da Social Democracia Brasileira—Party of Brazilian Social Democracy) image. That's the party of President Fernando Henrique Cardoso. Cunha Santos also plays the hiding game, even though he confided to friends that he did not vote for Lula in 1998. One of his favorite sayings, "I'm against magic, but in favor of enchantment."

This Lady's for You

Guanaes doesn't even like to be labeled a marketeer. "Marketeer? Not me," he uses to say with a touch of irony. "Marketeer is Duda. I'm a publicity professional. I only work with easy candidates, people I believe in. When the case gets complicated they call Duda." And he adds, "It's nonsense to say that you can sell a candidate like a beer or margarine."

It was like a beer, however, that Guanaes tried to sell the idea of a woman as the next president of Brazil. The adman was behind the overnight surge of Roseana Sarney, the governor of Maranhão, as a viable candidate to the presidency.

In January, Guanaes put on the air an ad for Roseana Sarney that would provoke cartoons, essays and all kinds of notes in the media. In it, the then presidential hopeful appeared ebullient and light in an MTV-like clip, with festive music and an air of celebration. Smiling and confident, Maranhão's governor raised the index finger in a gesture that in Brazil means number one. It seemed like a beer TV spot. It was a beer spot. Plagiarized from a memorable campaign started in 1991 for Brahma beer, which put the whole country pointing the finger up to denote first place.

In a few weeks, from practically unknown, Ms Sarney was threatening in the polls the leadership of Lula. "It makes lots of sense," pointed a piece that circulated in the Internet. "Maranhão, after all, is first in the poverty index, in illiteracy, in infant mortality, in school evasion, and as the worst distribution of GDP."

Writing in Veja, Brazil's largest-circulation magazine, essayist Roberto Pompeu de Toledo commented: "You don't see any beer, but whoever remember the Brahma spot—and who doesn't?—will have his mind invaded by images of bottles being opened and glasses being raised in celebration, swallows being deliciously pushed down the hatch and running foam. The spot is the apotheotic marriage of politics with barley and hops, of the "little blondie" with the intention to vote, of the pleasure and the high with the ballot.

PT House Representative Aloízio Mercadante made fun of the TV ad commenting, "It's a danger that Roseana mixes her presidential hopes with beer because the voter will end up thinking that he can only vote for her if intoxicated."

Despite being the head of one of the poorest and worst managed states in Brazil and the daughter of a discredited former president (José Sarney, 1985-1990), Ms Sarney, thanks to a barrage of TV ads, went in a few weeks to the top of the polls, in the biggest challenge so far to Lula's first place. Her hopes were short lived, however, since she became involved in a scandal dealing with stacks of illegally obtained cash for the financing of her campaign. Roseana and her aides were never able to explain the origin of the money and the whole effort fizzled as fast as an opened beer bottle.

Duda seems to thrive in missions impossible. After orchestrating Paulo Maluf's campaign for mayor of São Paulo, four years later he was also able to make from Celso Pitta, Maluf's unknown Finance Secretary, his successor in City Hall. He doesn't see any incompatibility and incoherence in the causes he embraces. "I have a style. I don't use low blows, dirty tricks, or lies. And I refuse to work with certain candidates," he says without disclosing who is on his blacklist.

The same Duda has faced a series of failures in the 1998 elections though. Candidates who he worked for in São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Rio Grande do Sul, Minas Gerais and Goiás, all lost. These disasters, however, haven't dampened his prestige.

Hard-Sell Candidate

Nizan had promised not to embark on another political campaign, but he could not resist the temptation of being in the spotlight. President Cardoso was trying to enlist him to join the Serra effort even when Guanaes was producing the snazzy spots for Roseana. "I'll do anything that Fernando Henrique Cardoso asks me to," admitted the publicist.

He even found an explanation for having helped Ms Sarney, who had become a serious threat to the government candidate. "I haven't changed my candidate. It happens that Roseana was linked to a party allied to the government. When it became clear that we would have serious differences, I placed myself where I have been these last eight years: beside Fernando Henrique Cardoso." And, on another occasion, he added, "I'm going to do this for my children. The world has become a tough place and we have to help the country."

Guanaes admits that it was a big mistake to have worked for the José Serra campaign for mayor of São Paulo in 1996, another occasion on which cordial foes Nizan and Duda were in direct warfare. And now that he is again working for Serra, the adman talks about the difficulty of the task: "Serra is no Our Lady of Congeniality. Lula is more congenial, but he is also less prepared for the presidency." For the publicist, his choice as government candidate for the presidency would have been Tasso Jereissati, the PSDB governor of Ceará state, whom he considers charismatic.

Serra has been such a hard sell that the Cardoso administration almost went into panic mode. According to weekly newsmagazine Isto É, the despair among the government allies was so acute in recent weeks that some suggested that the President should try do change the law so he could run for a third time. But Cardoso, who has already benefited from a change in the legislation that allowed him to be reelected, nixed the idea.

Lula, for months, has kept the first ranking in the polls, hovering around 40 percent, while Serra, the government candidate only in June was able to reach a little above 20 percent. The economy, however, has not reacted too well to the PT candidate's success. The opposition, on the other hand, seems interested in linking Lula's good ratings to the increase in the dollar, the fall of the stock market and the record peaks for the so-called Brazil risk, measured by the J.P. Morgan EMBI (Emerging Markets Bond Index). That index had risen to 1,770 points on June 21. The risk factor has become an important index, divulged daily by the main Brazilian publications.

Thanks to this Brazil became the riskiest country in the world losing only to Argentina with 6,362 points. Right behind Brazil are Nigeria and Ecuador, in the third and fourth places respectively. This index is calculated using the difference, in centesimal percentage point, between the interest paid by the US Treasure bonds (considered zero risk) and the interest paid by the country's debt conversion bond. According to investors, the bigger the index the bigger the chances for a country to declare a moratorium.

A Brazil risk of 1770 points means that a foreign investor demands an interest rate of 17.7 percent a year above what a US T-Bond pays yearly to buy a Brazilian foreign debt bond. On June 21 the 30-year US Treasure bond was paying 5.3 percent a year, meaning that the expected interest for the Brazilian paper was 23 percent.

Tired of being made scapegoats for all the bad new in the economic front, the PT leaders reacted angrily. June 12, House Representative Aloízio Mercadante denounced a complot to blame the Workers Party for the country's economic woes:

"There is a serious problem with the public finances," he declared. "After eight years in which our foreign and public debts went out of control, the government tries to transfer this responsibility to the election and to Lula. Our party has to be careful to prevent such a plot and has to make clear to the population that the government is responsible for this crisis."

Marta Suplicy, the mayor of São Paulo, who is also a petista (from the PT), went to radio to try to calm her constituents: "Lula has publicly been defending the currency's stability, the respect to contracts, fiscal responsibility, the search for the primary surplus, inflation control and the opening of our currency. The present fragility of the country will end when Lula is elected," she concluded.

Mercadante also blamed international speculators for the sinister economic climate. "There is a wing from the government party and from the administration itself working on the basis of the worse the better, which is the strategy of international speculators," he said. "It's not by chance that these speculators with Soros in the lead, have former minister José Serra as their preferred candidate."

Angry at the accusation that his candidacy is responsible for destabilizing the market, the PT candidate accused the Cardoso administration of setting a bomb in the economy and fomenting speculation: "The only way for the government to prevent us from winning the elections is by creating panic in society. They need to stop playing with pipe bombs because they can blow up in their laps and this will not serve anyone. Because we are losing credibility, we are playing with serious stuff, and soon we will really lose the control of everything in this country."

Lula has also turned his guns against those he calls "foreign loan sharks. They are carrying out terrorism against Brazil with the government's help." He also said he would not surrender to international pressures to present his government program: "I'm not the president and I cannot take any initiative under the pretext of saving Brazil. The speculators are not worried with millions of healthless Brazilians, with the jobless or youngsters without an opportunity. We will present our government program to the Brazilians. To the speculators I have nothing to say."

Too Many Polls

The owner of ad agency W/Brasil, Washington Olivetto, one the high priests of the Brazilian ad world, has harshly criticized the way marketing is being used in politics. Writing in the daily Folha de São Paulo on June 9, he blasted the media for naïvely attributing miraculous powers to marketeers: "What is perhaps more surprising, however, is the naïveté of the candidates who start to think that in order to be elected they need to become the character that someone told them they should look at the eyes of the consumer."

And he continues: "The daily and weekly voracity of newspapers, magazines, radios and TV stations lead the media to use every poll—when it doesn't have one, it creates its own—to generate headlines. It publishes and divulges information that is less than forecast or premonitions, little more than nothing. It tells millions of citizens what a few hundred ill-informed and ill-questioned Misterjohns and Mistressmarys answered they would do if the elections were today and not in 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5… months."

Olivetto says that he will only work for private companies and that he has no intention of ever working in a political campaign. He believes that political marketing can benefit a few candidates that are very honest but with little charisma, "but, from another standpoint, it can harm entire populations. It's something if an aide helps a soccer player to dress in an Armani suit, but it's something very different if he wants to alter their personalities."

For all its self-congratulatory slaps on the back, the Brazilian marketeering establishment is not without its sins. Some even believe that it's time to doubt its own hype. Writing for Observatório da Imprensa (www.observatoriodaimprensa.com.br), an online media watchdog, journalist and TV director Nelson Hoineff, commented: "Every time we get close to the elections we have to deal with the myth of Brazil's political marketing excellence. It's a given that this is something above any suspicion, like the quality of the Brazilian soap operas or the superiority of our soccer. However, the soap operas are not as good as we believed they were, and when I write soccer is not even among the world's best teams. And the facts everyday challenge the quality of the Brazilian political marketing beyond a mere immediatist efficiency.

"If Roseana was a marketing creation, her demise was precipitated by the inexperience of Haroldo Cardoso, the marketeer who took over for Guanaes, when he answered the President's appeal to join the PSDB campaign. In the two TV spots prepared to explain why the federal police found so much unaccountable cash at Lunus—the company from Roseana's husband and financial director—the presidential hopeful appeared in a sorrow state. Just the opposite of the ebullient woman from the initial TV spot."

"It's natural that a woman under such pressure would show it in her face," marketeer Cardoso tried to justify. He was crucified anyway by more seasoned marketing professionals who teach that "what's bad we hide."

Wrote journalist and TV director, Paulo José Araújo da Cunha, "Any TV office boy knows that television is never neuter. Who is exposed to it goes up or down. If the woman had a PMS face, the ads should have been thrown in the trash, period. In TV is better not to show than to show badly."

Bad Boys, Good Boys

"He is the Roberto Carlos of political marketing," says adman Fernando Barros about Duda. Roberto Carlos, naturally, is the King, the romantic composer whose mellow songs for three decades have been selling in the millions in Brazil and Latin America.

Guanaes lives in a nervous pace, always trying new challenges. In 1999 he left the helm of DM9DDB, his ad agency, to direct a free Internet provider portal, the iG (Internet Grátis). The experience was a success, but without the captain aboard, his company started to take on water when large companies like Microsoft, Compaq and Antarctica decided to jump ship. Worried about the mass desertion he went back to his company in March. And DM9DDB seems to be back on track again.

Chico Malfitani, one of the pioneers of political marketing in Brazil, has repeatedly chastised those for whom he once served as a model. The journalist and sociologist from São Paulo has compared political marketing experts to Joseph Goebbels (1897-1945), the Nazi Minister for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. In an interview with Folha de São Paulo, the newspaper with the largest circulation in Brazil (an average of 400,000 copies a day), Malfitani complained that political marketeers have become celebrities: "There were never so many lies. They say that Duda Mendonça, Nizan Guanaes, Nelson Biondi are geniuses. They are all over valued."

For Malfitani, political marketing is being used in a criminal way, putting at risk the budding Brazilian democracy. "It's a crime. Marketeers are helping to radicalize the idea that all politicians are the same. All campaigns are the same, everything's Big Mac, everything was globalized. The publicist who peddles products also sells lies, but there is a difference. If I don't like the beer I change to another one. Not with the politician. You'll have to stay with him for four years. There's no return. That's why we have this great responsibility. You cannot act as Pontius Pilate and wash your hands and say that this is a job as any other. It is not. It's very different."

Malfitani, who is not involved in any important campaign ("I would work for the PT, for former president Itamar Franco due to his coherence and against anything that represents Paulo Maluf.") levels serious criticism against Guanaes and Mendonça. And he doesn't forgive Guanaes for glamorizing Roseana Sarney, "How can you say that the people of Maranhão live well when 64 percent of the families there are below the poverty line? Then a marketeer uses a parody of a beer commercial, the number 1, to compare it to the governor. Ain't that cute?"

He doesn't spare Mendonça either, "What has Duda won that was important, recently? He's always talking about his victories, but he loses a lot. He does several campaigns, at the same time, in several states, using the same pieces and changing only the candidate's name."

In the last few months, some critics have questioned the constant use of election polls by the media, the parties, private companies and even foreign banks like Bank of America. Some politicians suggested that the practice be investigated by a House Enquiry Committee.

For Mauro Francisco Paulino, general director of DataFolha, company from the Grupo Folha, which also controls the Folha de São Paulo newspaper, some polling services are distorting the real objective of opinion polls. He compares the polls' results to portraits: "But in this campaign these polls also have been used as levers when taken right after a TV programs of one of the candidates. It's like taking a picture of many models, but choosing a better angle for one of them."

Not so fast, says Carlos Augusto Montenegro, the president of Ibope (Instituto Brasileiro de Opinião Pública e Estatística—Brazilian Institute of Public Opinion and Statistics) Brazil's most traditional and most respected opinion gauge. "If we start to think like this, then very soon we will forbid researches like the one after José Serra started his campaign in the media."

Pollsters have proliferated in recent years, following in the steps of IBOPE, which exists since 1942. The new (and not so new) kids in the block have names like Vox Populi (The People's Voice), Sensus and Iuperj (Instituto Universitário de Pesquisa do Rio de Janeiro—Universitarian Research Institute of Rio de Janeiro).

"In an ideal world," says Vox Populi's director Marcos Coimbra, "polls would neutralize conjunctural effects, in order to be as balanced as possible.

According to these same polls, Brazilians are more and more distrusting of polls. In 1994, 23 percent of Brazilians considered them unreliable. By the end of last year the number of doubting Thomases had increased to 39 percent. While seven years ago 16 percent of Brazilians accused pollsters of manipulating the data, today 30 percent blame them for manipulation, more than they do politicians, for example.

Person vs. Product

Chico Santa Rita, journalist and author of just-released Batalhas Eleitorais - 25 Anos de Marketing Político (Electoral Battles _ 25 Years of Political Marketing) believes that there is a big difference between political marketing and advertising campaigns. The former reaches the public as a positive message about the candidate, the latter sells the candidate as a consumer product.

"The best campaign may not lead the candidate to victory," says Paulo de Tarso Santos, in charge of the PSDB image at the national level. He illustrates that with the 1989 presidential campaign when Lula's marketing effort was considered better even by those who voted for the opposing candidate, Fernando Collor de Mello. "But when it was time to vote, other criteria came into play, like the middle-class conservatism, which ended up electing Collor de Mello."

In 1989, political marketing as we know today was just starting in Brazil. Collor himself had no professional help when the "Lula Lá" (Lula There) jingle swept the nation and hinted that Lula's victory was inevitable. Only then, the former governor of Alagoas hired the Setembro ad agency to help him.
 

Lula lá! by Hilton Acioly theme song of Lula's '89 campaign Passa o tempo e tanta gente a trabalhar De repente essa clareza pra notar Quem sempre foi sincero e confiar Sem medo de ser feliz! Quero ver chegar... Lula-lá! Brilha uma estrela! Lula-lá! Cresce a esperança! Lula-lá! No Brasil criança e na alegria de se abraçar... Lula-lá! Com sinceridade! Lula-lá! Com toda a certeza! Pra você meu primeiro voto pra fazer brilhar nossa estrela! Lula-lá! É a gente junto! Lula-lá! Valeu a espera! Lula-lá! Meu primeiro voto pra fazer brilhar nossa estrela!

Lula there! Time passes and so many people working Suddenly it becomes so clear to see Who always was sincere and to trust Having no fear of being happy! I want to see this coming… Lula-there! A star shines! Lula-there! Hope grows! Lula-there! In child Brazil and in the joy of embracing Lula-there! With sincerity! Lula-there! With all certainty! To you my first vote To make our star shine! Lula-there! Everybody together! Lula-there! The wait was worthwhile! Lula-there! My first vote to make our star shine!

(You can listen to the Lula-lá jingle in our site at http://www.brazzil.com/lula.mp3  or http://www.brazzil.com/lula.ram) 

Professional marketing was able to derail the well-oiled Lula victory train with a bomb revelation, just five days before the elections. A statement by a former Lula girlfriend was inserted into an hour-long TV program, which buried any hope of presidency for the candidate. The woman revealed that the candidate had had with her an out-of-wedlock—up-until-then undisclosed—child and that the PT candidate had asked her without success to have an abortion.

Blooming Marketing

"Brazil reunites now the essential conditions for an explosion of the political propaganda market," says consulting marketing expert André Torreta. "And these conditions are a strong democracy, creativity and relevancy."

After electing Jânio Quadros for president in 1960, Brazilians had to wait another 40 years to choose another president. From 1964 to 1985, the country was a dictatorship led by generals, and the first civilian president to emerge after two decades of military domination was chosen by Congress.

Marketing professionals are fiercely being sought this year. After all, besides electing a new president the 115.2 million voters will be also choosing governors, senators and House representatives. These marketing wizards are interfering not only with the clothes, appearance and gestures of their candidates, but with their message itself.

For journalist Santa Rita, they are in a strong enough position to choose the slogans and themes their candidates will use: "The main idea of the final phase of the presidential campaign will be the resumption of the economic development in order to create more jobs and a new policy for substituting imports, which, at the same time will protect the national productive sectors and guarantee a better international competitiveness for the national product."

There is no denying the strong influence of the American way of political marketing in Brazilian politics. TV debates, button, TV spots, jingles, billboards and lots of terms (and slang) are borrowed from the US marketing machinery.

For adman André Torreta, it was in the '40s, during the Getúlio Vargas administration, that Brazil saw the dawn of political marketing. In 1960, however, with the presidential campaign of Jânio Quadros—who would succeed Juscelino Kubitschek, the man who built Brasília—marketeers started to emerge.

In a master stroke, the Quadros' campaign adopted the broom as the symbol for his candidacy. The broom, which appeared in pins, buttons, posters and other political paraphernalia, represented the candidate's promise to clean the government and the country from corruption. The broom jingle became a hit and people used to sing it in the streets.
 

Varre, varre, varre, varre, varre, varre, vassourinha Varre, varre a bandalheira Que o povo está cansado De sofrer desta maneira Jânio Quadros é a esperança desse povo abandonado

Sweep, sweep, sweep, sweep, sweep, sweep, little broom Sweep, sweep the roguery Because the people is tired Of suffering like this Jânio Quadros is the hope of this abandoned people

(You can listen to the Jânio Quadros's jingle here: http://www.brazzil.com/janio.mp3)

The generals also used marketing in an effort to legitimize their administration. Among the successful ones there were the nationalistic appeals of the "Brazil, love it or leave it" campaign, in the late '60s. In the '70s, with a highly indebted country, which was experiencing fast economic growth, the military orchestrated the "Brazil Power" drive, with the slogan "Ninguém segura este país" (There is no holding back this country)
 

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Price Tag: $25 million

Trying to estimate the costs a candidate will face for running a presidential campaign in 2002, for a mere three months, Professor Gaudêncio Torquato, in a study prepared for weekly newsmagazine Época, arrived at these amounts (in dollars):

TV and radio programs: $7 million

Campaign staff: $5 million

Transportation and fuel: $3 million

70 million cards, posters and leaflets: $3 million

Stump speeches and mobile caravans: $2 million

5 million T-shirts and caps: $1.5 million

10 million flags and buttons: $1 million

Telemarketing: $1 million

700 billboards: $1 million

Polls: $600 thousand

Food: $400 thousand

Rent and maintenance of office space: $110 thousand

Lula was expected to spend at least $11 million, but this amount should increase considerably now that the party sealed its alliance with the PL (Partido Liberal—Liberal Party).

The Serra campaign announced that its candidate has a $22 million budget. Radio and TV alone, under the supervision of Nizan Guanaes, should absorb 40 percent of this money.

Anthony Garotinho has initially a $11 million budget, like Lula. He intends to ask individual contributions of 1 real (30 cents) to raise funds.

Ciro Gomes is the most frugal of all, planning to spend $9 million. This, naturally, might change if he starts showing better in the polls.

By comparison, the Center for Responsive Politics estimates that during the 2000 American presidential elections Al Gore spent $120 million on his campaign, while George Bush spent $186 million.

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