There is plenty of blame to be shared for Brazil’s troubled political scenario. But for Marco Feliciano, the country’s human rights boss, it’s all the devil’s fault. At least that’s what he said during a religious gathering this past weekend in a small town in southeast Brazil, when talking about his predecessors–”They were dominated by Satan,” he reportedly told the audience, later explaining that by ‘Satan’ he “just meant his opponents.”  Feliciano is, of course, the infamous evangelical-preacher-turned-political leader whose most famous remarks include his depreciation of the opposite sex (“If women achieve gender equality, the traditional family will collapse and society will become gay”), African descendants (“They were cursed by Noah. That’s a fact”) and gays (“Salvation is available to them in the form a gay ‘cure’). He is also under investigation for embezzlement and homophobia. In spite of his controversial resumé, Feliciano was recently-elected president of Brazil’s House of Representatives Human Rights and Minorities Commission, creating, as one would expect, a national uproar.  Although his ascendance to the job was fairly constitutional, since he was democratically elected as a representative with tens of thousands of votes, and therefore represents the people (or a part of the people, as the rule goes in a democracy) to preside over the commission, apparently none of the representatives who chose him as a human rights defender thought of researching his views on the aforementioned topics, consequently avoiding the stir. And, most importantly, nobody cared if he had the credentials for the office he now holds. Why not? Because it simply doesn’t matter.  The only reason why Feliciano, who counts Brazil’s third-richest pastor Silas Malafaia as an ally, was chosen for the position is because his party, the Social Christian Party (PSC), is being courted to support Dilma Rousseff in next year’s presidential elections, a deal that would give Rousseff’s Workers’ Party coalition more TV time. In order to jump on the bandwagon, PSC requested a strategic position in Brasilia, a city that is, truth be told, full of Felicianos. The preacher was the catch.  Brazilian politics are difficult for non-Brazilians to follow, and foreign observers often reduce the political arena to a simple left-right divide. As a consequence, one of the frustrations for many Brazilians is how little choice they are being offered by the two main blocks. Despite some of Brazil’s recent social and economic improvements, it remains one of the most corrupt, violent, bureaucratic and unequal countries on earth, yet no political leader or party seems to be offering anything other than a continuation of the status quo.  But Marina Silva, 55, thinks she may be able to change that state of affairs. The former environmental minister during Luis Inacio Lula da Silva’s term as Brazil’s president (2003-2011), and a rubber tapper who had been virtually illiterate until her teens in her home state of Acre, deep in Brazil’s western Amazonian jungle, Silva came third in the 2010 presidential elections as a then Brazil’s Green Party’s (PV) candidate. She has since left PV and launched a new party a few weeks ago, the Sustainability Network (Rede Sustentabilidade, in Portuguese), thus pointing to a possible candidacy for president in the 2014 elections. (According to a poll from the Brazilian Institute of Public Opinion and Statistics (IBOPE), and published by O Estado de Sao Paulo newspaper, if the elections were held today Silva would be the runoff behind Rousseff, who would be elected at the first round.)  Silva is convinced the old way of doing politics has collapsed, and the new way is no party is greater than the people. “We are living a moral-political crisis of civilatory values. Victor Hugo used to say that there is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come. This is the time to change things, even the way we relate to each other and how we do politics. I believe that a multicentered political process will be the ultimate rule from now on, in one day we lead and the next we are led,” Silva told FORBES in an exclusive interview.  It may sound as an old-fashioned political campaign speech, or even a bit “arrogant,” as one critic has suggested, but Silva seems to have a few points of merit. First, she is a modern politician completely out of step with Brazil’s current crop of leaders, and that’s a good thing. Besides, just like Barack Obama in his early White House days, Silva has an ability to inspire hope and a sense of unlimited possibility. And she also acknowledges the power of the internet to break down barriers in politics, and its importance in Brazil–Brazilians are among the world’s most prolific users of Facebook and Twitter.  “New ways of communication can revolutionize politics. We live in a time when there are constantly less activists on the streets. The new activists are now on the internet, and I call them ‘authorial activists.’ We were able to see their power during the Occupy movement, which was organized online. These movements are harder to get lost in individualism,” she says.  Brazilians have recently created an online petition calling for the impeachment of Renan Calheiros, who was elected president of Brazil’s Senate on February 1st in spite of his resignation, in 2007, after allegations that a lobbyist had paid maintenance on his behalf to a lover with whom he had had a child, and that he then faked receipts for the sale of cattle to try to prove that he could have afforded to pay her himself. Calheiros denies all wrongdoing and has since stayed active in politics, but only behind the scenes. His allies in the Party of the Brazilian Democratic Movement (PMDB), Brazil’s largest, evidently judged it was time for him to return to center-stage.  Most political analysts called the petition, which notched more than 1.5 million signatures, “pointless,” what may be truth, since Calheiros is still in power. Silva, however, seems it differently. “The simple fact that so many people voted on this petition is already a significant result. I believe it is just a matter of time until these people, and their opinions, will overflow politics.”  Silva cites her campaign to Brazil’s presidency, in 2010, as an example of what’s coming. As a then-Green Party candidate, she had little TV time and a modest funding to promote her views, thus counting almost exclusively on the internet to reach voters. At the end, she gained 19.3% of the vote, finishing the race in third and contributing to Rousseff’s failure to gain 50% of the votes, making a run-off election necessary.  The World Wide Web is still learning how to stage protests online, with people and companies trying different tactics, throwing spaghetti against the Internet and waiting to see what sticks. Recent online protests in the United States, such as the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect Intellectual Property, not to mention the revolutions in the Middle East in 2011, seem to have pushed the online activism experiment a little further. But the whole thing is still too segmented.  “Two important commissions in Brasilia were occupied under the rules of political guile this year. The Human Rights and Minorities commission ended up with Marco Feliciano, a religious man who has no culture of human rights. Politicians should be chosen by their political views, not by whatever conservative or reactionary positions they may defend. People with faith may be unprepared. Then there’s the case of the senate’s Environmental, Fiscalization and Control commission, which is now headed by Blairo Maggi, who also has no merit for the job. People should be protesting against Maggi too,” Silva, who’s also an active evangelical Christian, states, mentioning the owner of one of Brazil’s largest soy producers, transporters and exporters, a man who was once described by The New York Times as a “Relentless foe of the Amazon jungle.”  When it comes to the government of Rousseff, Silva goes ballistic.”While former president Fernando Henrique Cardoso was able to give the matter of economic stability its rightful place, and former president Lula da Silva was able to maintain that stability and use it to diminish poverty, the current government didn’t follow that path. Our current president didn’t actually add anything new to the agenda, in fact she promoted major setbacks, like the deforestation bill, and she doesn’t think about sustainable development, which should be a flag for mankind. A country like Brazil should not be exclusively dependant on its natural resources; there should be more investments in technology, and a good knowledge basis. We must have a strategic vision instead of insisting on old models,” Silva explains.  Silva’s “Network,” as the new party’s supporters simply call it, is already trying to make things different from within. Unlike the traditional parties, it will impose term limits on its representatives and turn away dodgy donations and members. And even though Silva denies being in campaign mode , the new party’s first big challenge is already taking way: it hopes to appeal to both greens and voters fed up with politics as usual, and it is turning to social media to whip up the 500,000 signatures it needs by October if it is to field Silva as a presidential candidate.  But she knows that promoting the change she is calling for is something of another dimension. “A party should work as a network. If I were only concerned about the next election, I would’ve created a new party right after leaving PV. But the society as a whole and its civic movement towards increased transparency of public life and a greater democracy is way more important. Leadership isn’t about power for the sake of power,” she says. “And if ever thought of quitting on something that looks impossible to achieve, I wouldn’t have built a 30-year career in politics coming from nothing.”  Perhaps Marina Silva’s dream of becoming the president of Brazil just got a little smaller.
Marina Silva, the humble woman who overcame extreme poverty to become a force in Brazilian politics, could prove an inspiration to Brazilians in their search for a better and more honest political system.