WASHINGTON DC–Brazil’s general election has produced the goods–continuation of sober government, fiscally conservative with a social conscience. With a bit of luck Brazil’s present role as the lynchpin that could make or break the world economy will, before too long, be regarded as an historical anomaly. Assuming–and a lot of hard work remains to be done–they can get their act together, the West’s Group of Seven and the International Monetary Fund will soon extend the large loan necessary to get Brazil over the hump of the stream of dollars hemorrhaging from the country. (A total of $50 billion is the quite mammoth loan talked about.) To let Brazil go on sliding down the financial chute would be to give another shove to the cannon-balls rolling and ricocheting round the deck of the good ship “World Economy”, with the likelihood they’ll puncture first the deck and then the hull.

Fernando Henrique Cardosa’s re-election in a scandal-free open contest, with its tangible promise of further fiscal reform, makes outside investment and aid the direct opposite of pouring money down a rat hole, as bankers finally decided was the case in Indonesia and Russia. Brazil could now start to realize its quite immense potential.

Before Cardosa came to office, first as finance minister (where he engineered policies that set in motion a drop of inflation from 2000% per annum to around 3%), then as president, the land of the greatest opportunity in Latin America was going to seed, and that before it really bloomed. Only a generation ago Brazil was a fabulous country of bounteous promise, preparing for an economic lift-off that could have easily by now put it within sight of being on a par with the U.S. and Canada. Observers classed Brazil in the same league as Taiwan. Between them, they shared the honours of being the fastest-growing economy of the century.

But Brazil abjured the high road, took the low and became a wastrel. While Taiwan continued to pull ahead, its economic motor purring, its social problems reasonably in hand, Brazil had minimal economic growth, high inflation and unemployment and mass impoverishment of the peasantry. Its political ruling class, its army heirarchy and upper business clique were at best short-sighted, at worst riven by corruption. In the late 1980s it elected a Kennedy-type figure, Fernando Collor de Mello, who was going to bring new life– economic growth, land reform and political vitality. In the end he bequeathed none of the above and was forced to resign following a public accusation of financial impropriety made by his brother.

Until Cardosa came along, Brazil in its modern history appeared to have managed to marry the worst of feudalism with the worst of capitalism, each feeding off the other’s less worthy characteristics. It was a terrible fusion that created an explosion of social disintegration. Brazil’s dispossessed peasantry, burgeoning shanty towns, soaring crime rate and growing numbers of abandoned street urchins, regarded by the police and vigilantes as no better than stray dogs, was the consequence.

Fundamentally, it has been the same Brazil all along; the people do not change. It is all a question of leadership. The country was like a sleeping princess, awaiting the frog who after the kiss would turn into the prince. It is a mighty nation of vast dimensions, with a population of 160 million. It is bounded by the steamy, timber-rich tropical rain forest of the Amazon river to the north and the cool, temperate, magnificent prairies to the south. No other country in the world offers such geographic contrasts nor, probably, such an abundance of raw materials and raw opportunities.

Brazil, until recently, always lived its fantasy. Copacabana beach, the carnival and the samba were not just tourist brochure concoctions. They were Brazil as it really was–the archetypal relaxed, tolerant and gregarious society. A country that has not gone to war since 1870. A country that, revolted by a miscarriage of justice, abolished capital punishment in 1885. A country that, though its black population was poor and undereducated, never had Jim Crow laws. If you made it in Brazil, you could marry whom you pleased and live where you liked. In short, this country had all the potential to be one of the great pillars of civilization in the 21st. century.

Now Cardoso has the mandate he needs–a convincing first round win. He can start to trim the government payroll with its wages that are quite disproportionate compared to the private sector; he can tackle the ludicrous state pension system that over-compensates people who retire in the prime of life. He can push forward with land reform that if done well could liberate the energies and potential of millions of peasants. A successful rounded economic reform program will make Brazil again a country that investors willingly flock to, and make it one of the giants of the 21st. century too.

Such is the contagion of the present international financial crisis, saving Brazil will mean also saving Latin America, indeed perhaps even saving the Western world itself, from a thirties type great depression. Both Brazil and western governments have a lot riding on the good result of this election. It should mark the country’s turnaround and, indeed, if the western powers (including the U.S. Congress) can pull together, mark where the rot in the world’s greatest financial crisis for fifty years was finally brought to a stop.