There can be few places on earth which exhibit more vividly the tensions of modernity than Brasilia at Christmas time. Under tropical sun, giant models of Santa Claus drape over the tower blocks. Brasilia was carved out of the red earth of the planaltoas in the late 1950s, as the dream of then President Kubitschek. The capital of the fifth most populous country in the world is now approaching 40 in tentative mood.
The city, shaped like a huge bird or plane with its head pointing into Lake Parano, has to some degree "worked," attaining a kind of actually existing futurism. Between 600,000-700,000 people live in Brasilia itself, the height of their buildings and all other big issues still regulated by the communist architect Oscar Niemeyer, now in his 90s. The traffic flows with a unique hum resulting from the almost complete lack of traffic lights. Urban space is rigidly divided into different sectors: one for hotels; one for shops and billboard advertisements; one for the superquadras or blocks of flats; another the setor autarquia, for private residences. At night it is lit in ethereal splendour.
The cost of building and sustaining Brasilia has contributed to the distortions of the Brazilian economy. And the press rails occasionally against the gazeteiros, civil servants and politicians entitled to free flights, who leave on Wednesday evening. (The first time I was here, Margaret Thatcher was in town: she caused much embarrassment by expecting to receive important guests at the British embassy on a Friday evening.)
Twenty minutes drive from the centre, past families living under black plastic bags on the space between carriageways, lies the antithesis of modernist Brasilia-the satellite cities of the third world, Planaltina and Sobradinho: single-storey, open-fronted houses, horses, shops; the inhabitants are migrants from the interior. Signs proclaiming that "Jesus loves you" are ever-present.
But the attention of Brazil, and of much of the world, is now fixed on the inhabitant of the presidential palace. Elected first in 1994, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, famous in the 1970s as a Marxist sociologist and in the 1980s as a man who refused to say that he believed in God, was elected with a centre-right coalition on the strength of his anti-inflationary policy: he succeeded in reducing inflation from a high of 2,400 per cent per annum to next to zero. He has overseen the opening of Brazil to the world market, with a wave of privatisations and tariff reductions. Capital flowed in, making Brazil, with France, the fourth largest recipient in the world of foreign direct investment.
There were those who questioned this strategy: too much of the capital came in on a short-term basis to buy up shares of privatised firms; the new currency, the real, pegged to the dollar, was deemed by many-not least Brazilian industrialists-to be overvalued. Last year, following the east Asian and Russian crises, Brazil lost half of its $74 billion of foreign reserves in three months. Brazilians said: a bola de vez, "it is our turn to be kicked." The strength of their economy, Cardoso's personal credibility, and the dangers to the world financial system if it did collapse, combined to get the IMF to arrange stand-by credit of $42 billion.
However, it may not work. Or rather, the Brazilian political system may not be willing to pay the price. The stand-by is conditional on Brazil cutting $28 billion from its budget, equivalent to a reduction in the fiscal deficit from 8 per cent of GDP to 4.7 per cent. Pensions and perks, such as free air travel, are on a lavish scale. In a country with vivid memories of inflation these privileges command widespread support. The result: Congress revolted against the cuts. Cardoso's advisers blamed infidelidade partidaria, the unreliability of the parties. Cardoso himself denounced those who take large pensions as vagabondos.
The president's immediate challenge is to turn a Congress of squabbling factions into a nationally organised, more disciplined, party system. In this he faces an additional challenge from a federal system. (Remarkably, of the five semi-continental federal systems left in the world, Brazil's is the only one not once part of the British empire.)
State governors account for a third of state expenditure; in the October elections the left, which won 45 per cent of the presidential vote, won power in six states, among them the industrially powerful Rio Grande do Sul. The left-including the Labour party, the Communist party and the Popular Socialist party-may be bereft of credible ideas for resolving the crisis, but they are not prepared to allow the IMF to impose its conditions on Brazil. Already governors are refusing to pay their debts to the central government.
Cardoso's greatest task is to reverse the growing inequality of this vast country. By class, race and region Brazil is now the most unequal in Latin America. He has to do this within a political system riven with corruption and cynicism openly celebrated in the telenovelas. (One small example: the rector of a university recently arranged the distribution of new computers so that they went to those who had voted for him to get the job.)
Cardoso's followers, the PSDB, see themselves as a social democratic party close to Blair and Jospin. Its publishing house offers translations by among others, Will Hutton, Tony Blair, Aristotle, Clement Attlee, Kenneth Minogue and Eduard Bernstein. Beneath a formal solidarity with another member of the Mercosur trading bloc, the government is in favour of the prosecution of Pinochet.
Despite recent stock market nervousness, the hope is that when members of the new parliament take their seats in February, reform will become possible-although it is difficult to see how. As Brazilian optimism meets global financial structures, the world will watch with interest-and some concern.
