This is an election year in both Brazil and the USA. There is nothing surprising about that. Both countries have regular election cycles. The Brazilian election is a major affair with the voters selecting a new president to succeed the enormously popular Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the 26 state governors, all 513 members of the lower house of Congress as well as two-thirds of their 81 senators. In the USA the presidential term has not expired so this is called a mid-term election. All 435 seats in the House of Representatives, 37 of the 100 seats in the Senate, as well as 38 state and territorial governorships are up for grabs. Of course, there are also hundreds of local positions from state legislators to mayors to positions in the judiciary, all to be decided when the nation goes to the polls on November 2.

Elections this year in Brazil and the USA provide a study in sharp contrasts. Brazil approaches elections with enormous zeal, boosted this year by the outstanding international economic situation of their country. Brazilians had a first round of balloting on October 3 and since no presidential candidate got the required 50 per cent plus 1 of the votes, there will be a second round of balloting on October 31 between the two leading candidates, Dilma Rousseff of Lula’s Workers Party and José Serra of the Social Democratic Party.

By contrast, the economic situation of the USA is probably the worst since the Great Depression of the 1930s. With the unemployment rate hovering at 9.6 per cent and approximately 15 million individuals out of work, the national mood is most dour. Normally when there is so much unhappiness about in the land the electorate tends to punish the party in power. And this seems to be the case this year in the USA. Democrats who hold majorities in both houses of the Congress fear the worst, although the present economic problems arose largely under the previous Republican administration of George Bush who, between 2000 and 2008, managed to eliminate the substantial budget surplus built up by Bill Clinton. Not only that: Bush reduced taxes, mostly benefiting the rich, and started two extremely expensive wars in Iraq and Afghanistan without introducing any measures for underwriting them. At present both wars cost American taxpayers more than US$100 billion each year.

The three leading Brazilian presidential candidates reflect the healthy social and political diversity of the country. Dilma Rousseff, the daughter of a Bulgarian immigrant father and Portuguese mother, had a distinguished career as an economist and local political organiser in Porto Alegre before joining the Lula administration as minister of mines and energy and later chief of staff. Perhaps her major achievement as a minister was a legal requirement that the shipping industry and oil platform construction companies employ a minimum number of Brazilian nationals. In 2008 the shipping industry employed more than 40,000 Brazilians, up from just 500 in the mid-1990s. If, as expected, Rousseff wins the run-off elections against Serra, she would become the first woman president of Brazil. She has a long history of breaking gender barriers on the provincial and national scenes.

The parents of José Serra, the former governor of the large, important state of São Paulo, were both Italian immigrants of modest background. Serra was forced into exile for 14 years until 1978 by the military government that overthrew the government of President João Goulart in the coup of March 31, 1964. During his exile he lived in Bolivia, France, Chile and the United States. He earned an MA and a PhD in economics at Cornell University and was a fellow for two years at the internationally acclaimed Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. Appointed minister of planning and later minister of health in the Fernando Henrique Cardoso administration between 1994 and 2002, Serra created the Brazilian food and drug regulatory agency as well as an industry designed to produce generic low-cost drugs for the poor. He also banned tobacco advertising. He served as mayor of São Paulo City and governor of the state. He lost to Lula in the presidential elections of 2002 in the second round. In the first round elections on October 3 he gained 34 per cent of the votes.

Marina Silva Vaz de Lima of African and Portuguese ancestry on both sides was an associate of the murdered international Amazonian environmentalist and politician, Chico Mendes. She won many international prizes for her environmental work and was federal minister of the environment between 2003 and 2008 when she left the Workers Party of Lula to join the Green Party and become its presidential candidate. Silva is a member of the Pentecostal Christian Assemblies of God, the primary non-Catholic denomination in Brazil, and the evangelical community helped her garner 20 per cent of the votes in the first stage.

The interesting ethnic background and solid intellectual achievements of the three leading Brazilian presidential candidates would probably be severe handicaps in the United States. The US electorate, especially adherents to the Tea Party, demonstrate a marked lack of political sophistication. There is a general hankering for the good old days of Ronald Reagan, despite his disastrous economic policies. Many are attacking government at all levels while expecting government to solve their basic problems.

The economic decline of the USA predates the thoughtless actions of the George Bush presidency and can be traced back to the 1960s and 1970s. Successive Democratic and Republican administrations contributed to the haemorrhaging of the basic structure. President Obama has done much in two years to address the regulatory breakdowns that partly contributed to the present malaise. But it will take many years for the economy of the USA to recover. Of that every thinking person is certain. The imagined good old days will never return. The world has changed and the new economic powerhouses are Brazil, Russia, India and China. Brazil represents the future; the USA, the past.