MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Lula da Silva is “illiterate” and a “coarse speaker”

Singer and composer Caetano Veloso

Renowned Brazilian singer Caetano Veloso gave his full support to Green party presidential hopeful Marina Silva that he expects will show more elegance and pragmatism than President Lula da Silva, whom he described as “illiterate” and a “coarse speaker”.

“Marina is Lula da Silva and Obama at the same time”, said Veloso in an interview published Thursday in the Estado de Sao Paulo.

The singer and composer said he would be voting for the former Environment minister in 2010 and hopefully “in office she will be more pragmatic than Lula da Silva and more elegant, which of course she already is”.

Marina Silva “is brown and intelligent as Obama” but she’s not illiterate as Lula da Silva “who doesn’t know what to talk about and when he does he’s coarse”.

Veloso also spoke about the other presidential hopefuls for next year, Sao Paulo governor Jose Serra that leads comfortably in opinion polls and the current cabinet chief Dilma Rousseff whom Lula da Silva hand-picked as his successor.

“Serra (the main opposition candidate) was an excellent Health minister but he’s the kind of person, had he been elected in 2002 president, instead of Lula, he would have messed up the Brazilian economy”, said Veloso.

Dilma Rousseff on the other hand has been a most efficient bureaucrat but has no direct political power experience, “and was never elected to any post”.

Precisely Rousseff was seen as one of Silva’s main adversaries in the cabinet from 2003 to 2008, and it was one of the motives for her stepping down given the “growing resistances” which impeded her from going ahead with her environment agenda.

Last August Ms Silva signed out from Lula da Silva’s Workers Party because of “ideological misunderstandings” and joined the Greens presumably to head the presidential ticket of the party in next year’s election.