Brazil Putting His Best Foot Forward

In political terms, he came from nowhere: a well-bred landowner's son and former governor from the tropical hinterland who compared himself with Jimmy Carter. The similarities do not go far: like Carter, he ran against the federal government, tilting at its waste and mismanagement, but when it came to down-and-dirty campaigning, he seemed more like Richard Nixon. The combination worked: last week, after a heated runoff election, Fernando Collor de Mello, 40, won 43% of the vote, vs. his leftist opponent's 38%, to emerge as Brazil's first popularly elected President in 29 years. Scheduled to take office in Brasilia on March 15 to serve a five-year term, the conservative politician will be the youngest chief executive in his country's history.

Many might wonder why he sought the distinction. Brazil, with a population of 147 million, is now the eighth largest economy in the noncommunist world -- and one of the sickest. Under President Jose Sarney, who took office in 1985, it has run up the Third World's largest foreign debt ($110 billion), is being choked by bureaucracy and is mired in hyperinflation. Collor's credentials for curing those woes are slender: he served only one term in the National Congress, and the sleepy northeastern state he governed, Alagoas, has only 2.3 million people. Last week, however, Collor exuded confidence. "The problems of Brazil cannot be solved by a party or a small group of people," he declared, adding that he would seek a "wide national understanding" on social reforms to revive the country.

Consensus may be difficult to attain after the polarized election campaign. ; The runoff contest narrowed the 21-candidate field to Collor and a gritty dark-horse opponent, Luis Inacio Lula da Silva, a union leader and former industrial lathe operator who heads the leftist Workers' Party. Lula pounded away at populist themes -- he warned Collor that his landholdings would be subject to agrarian reform -- and outpointed the young conservative in the first of two televised debates. Toward the campaign's close, Collor took the low road, airing campaign spots that featured the married Lula's former lover, but the two continued to run neck and neck. Only at the end did the conservative pull away.

The victory marked an extraordinarily quick rise by Collor, scion of a wealthy political and publishing family in Alagoas. His father Arnon de Mello, a federal Senator, earned a bizarre niche in Brazilian history in 1963 when he shot a fellow legislator to death on the Senate floor. The elder Collor served several months in jail before it was decided that he had acted in self- defense.

Fernando Collor eventually took over management of the family media properties in Alagoas, which today include a newspaper, several radio stations and the local affiliate of the powerful Globo private television network. In 1979, the military government of the day appointed Collor mayor of the Alagoan capital, Maceio. In 1982 he was elected a federal deputy, and in 1986 he returned to Alagoas as governor.