Big tasks face Brazil's president-elect

SAO PAULO — Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva realized his dream of continuity by ushering his political protege into the presidency of Latin America's largest nation with a resounding election victory.

Now, President-elect Dilma Rousseff faces the monumental tasks of cutting government spending, developing some of the world's biggest oil finds in decades and improving schools.

At the same time, she has to prepare her nation to host the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Summer Olympics, and try to maintain Brazil's new prominence in international economic and political affairs carved out by her hugely popular predecessor.

Not clear, analysts said Monday, are what policy choices Rousseff will take to meet those challenges when she takes office Jan. 1 — and how the president-elect who has never before held elected office will orchestrate Brazil's boisterous and competing political interests that go into them.

"She is an enigma, a political case study in the making," said Marco Vicenzino, director of the Washington-based Global Strategy Project, a geopolitical research and analysis organization.

On Sunday, Rousseff was elected with 56 percent of the vote as the first female leader of Brazil, a country that has seen its economic fortunes rise and its global political clout grow during Silva's two 4-year terms. He was barred by law from seeking a third consecutive term.

During a heated campaign against a centrist rival, Rousseff, a former Marxist revolutionary during Brazil's dictatorship, made few detailed policy proposals. Analysts were left to read the tea leaves of her years in Silva's moderate government, where she first served as his energy minister and then spent four years as his chief of staff.

"The big landmine is can Brazil cut fiscal spending and bring interest rates down," said Riordan Roett, director of Latin American studies at Johns Hopkins University. "They're going to have to cut back on spending at some point. Or they will get a run of inflation. Where they cut will be an interesting issue."

Rousseff herself acknowledged that government spending — ramped up in this election year — would have to be tamed as she offered the first real peeks at how she might govern just moments are being elected.

"The Brazilian people will not accept a government that spends above a sustainable level," she said during a sober, 25-minute victory speech Sunday night. "We will make all efforts to improve the quality of public spending, to simplify and ease taxation and to improve the quality of public services."