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 Caetano Veloso, renowned Brazilian singer-composer, gave his full support to Brazil's Green party presidential hopeful Marina Silva who he expects will show more elegance and pragmatism than President Luiz Inácio 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 daily O Estado de S. Paulo.
Veloso, who with musician Gilberto Gil created the musical movement Tropicália in the 1960s, said he would be voting for the former Environment minister in the 2010 presidential election 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 José Serra, who 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 Marina 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 left Lula'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.
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