Emmanuel Negro • Brazil's Rousseff slams Europe for fiscal austerity

Brazil's Rousseff slams Europe for fiscal austerity

Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff snubbed the World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland this year and took part instead in Brazil’s anti-capitalist World Social Forum.

‘Another world is possible,’ she told her audience at the forum, picking up word for word the gathering’s motto.

Rousseff, a leftist politician who was herself a member of an urban guerilla group in her youth, slammed the fiscal austerity measures recommended for struggling European countries, and she called upon governments to listen to protestors in the streets.

Rousseff appeared at the forum in the southern Brazilian city of Porto Alegre, where she herself built her political career in the years after being jailed and tortured by the Brazilian military dictatorship.

The six-day World Social forum is due to end Sunday. It brings together thousands of Brazilian trade unionists, students and activists for indigenous and environmental causes, along with representatives of Spain’s Indignados, Chilean student protestors, the Occupy Wall Street movement and the Arab Spring.

The annual event was created in Brazil in 2001 as a protest against the World Economic Forum at Davos, which is also held this week but only for elite business leaders and top political figures.

The Porto Alegre forum pursues alternatives to ‘economic neo-liberalism’ - private enterprise, open markets, liberal trade and globalization.

In her address late Thursday at the Gigantinho sports complex, Rousseff talked about Brazil’s preparations for the UN Rio+20 Earth Summit, which is to be held in Rio de Janeiro in June. The gathering, she said, will be an opportunity to debate a new economic model that is ‘capable of conciliating development and the generation of income.’

She slammed austerity measures and noted that ‘failed recipes’ like those adopted in Brazil in the past, which she said left a legacy of economic stagnation, poverty and social exclusion.

‘The outrage of the young people, women and activists who are occupying the world’s streets cannot be overlooked,’ she said.

‘The dissonance between the voice of the markets and the voice of the streets appears to increase more and more in developed countries,’ she said.