SOMEONE asked me recently how I would feel if I woke up one morning in May 2015, with a general election looming, facing the following as a choice of possible future prime ministers.

A former member of a revolutionary Marxist urban guerrilla group, and a woman, who had been captured by the state and tortured because of her courageous and heroic fight for freedom.

Or a woman born and brought up in abject poverty, who fought alongside a legendary campaigner for the environment, set up trade unions and who, if she won, would be our first black prime minister.

I replied that I might feel like I had died and gone to heaven.

But this is not Britain. I am writing about Brazil.

I am a Brazilian living in Britain, watching the country of my birth with sometimes envious eyes  — when we win World Cups — but more often they’re sad, especially when I watch films of murderous police officers executing homeless children on the streets of cities where I used to walk as a child.

Once again this great nation, where voting is mandatory and where millions suffer intense poverty, is going to the polls.

One of the presidential candidates is of course Dilma Rouseff, the incumbent Workers Party president. She’s a Mineiro like me, meaning she was born in Minas Gerais, the second-most populous state in a country which looks more like a continent on the map.

As “Estela,” her underground name, she was a fiercely intelligent, independent and a leading fighter of the Palmares Armed Revolutionary Vanguard. She was caught by the military at the age of 22, tried, then taken to the cells where she was hung upside down naked, with wrists and ankles tightly bound. 

There she was tortured with electric shocks on her breasts and thighs by men. One can imagine this was not the extent of her sufferings. 

My family fled this Brazil for the country of my adopted parents’ birth, England.

It was 1966, the year of England’s one and only World Cup triumph. There were flags out and everyone was happy.

In Brazil, it was two years after a CIA-sponsored coup d’etat against a left-wing president democratically elected in a referendum. These were years of military repression and torture, extra-judicial murder, dictatorship and corruption. Not that corruption has ever been new to Brazil.

Around 400 people were murdered by the junta and thousands more were tortured, alongside Rouseff. Today she is miles ahead in the presidential election run-offs.

It should be of no surprise that a movement for national liberation in a country of vile repression and domination by the “Yankees,” should produce a women of astonishing vision and ability. What a story.

And for a short while, this great melting-pot nation of carnival and samba was truly blessed. Rouseff was being seriously challenged for the presidency by the great hope of the Greens, Marina Silva.

It is also unsurprising that a movement to save the Amazon and by extension the world included the legendary Chico Mendez. That movement, which took on the loggers and ultra-powerful global business interests intending to wipe out an indigenous people and its landless peasants movement would sooner or later produce another woman of stunning character and ability.

She’s a black woman, a socialist and “champion of the earth,” who’s an environmental prize-winner. Illiterate until after the age of 16 and one of 11 children, she was orphaned and suffered five bouts of malaria. 

She worked as a maid to help fund her time at university. Her early ill health dogs her still.

I always joke that I will never forgive my adopted parents for taking me from sexy Copacabana Beach to steely Sheffield, but then, an orphan in Brazil has very few life chances. In truth, they saved my life.

All the more impressive then, has been orphan Silva’s political rise and rise.

Now, as we come to the closing stages of Brazil’s presidential race, and with the eyes of Wall Street on which way this beautiful powder-keg population might vote, Silva’s challenge has ebbed away.

The Brazilians are left with a duller and more clear-cut choice between the Workers Party’s Rouseff or the right-wing Party of Brazilian Social Democracy candidate Aecio Neves. 

Pro-business Neves has surprised everyone with a late surge as Rouseff’s negative ads campaign damaged Silva. Now he is courting the Silva vote. Which way she and her supporters will jump could make the outcome close.

However, let’s not fall into the easy trap we in Britain fall into every five years. Politics is never simply about elections. And, in Brazil, nothing is simple. 

There is another more unpredictable element to Brazil’s incredible story which, like the meandering Amazon, is always there or, like the mammoth downpours which sweep away whole communities, can burst onto Brazil’s political stage in a moment. That element is the Brazilian people.

For all their passion, the Brazilians have shown incredible patience. Perhaps there is an element of resignation in their character. How else can they come to terms with poverty on a scale comparable to anywhere else in the world, cheek by jowl with grotesque riches?

You need innate restraint when faced with Catholic churches dripping in gold leaf while the poor gather outside on crutches, or the mouthy US-funded evangelicals bang on about scripture and demand a say in the nation’s moral and political direction. 

However, when the sleeping giant that is the Brazilian people is moved to act there are few other sights which strike such terror into the hearts of the world’s imperialist elites and their finance markets. 

Without very much notice, one of the world’s great plundered storehouses of wealth and natural resources looks vulnerable.

This year’s mass uprising was over billions of wasted reals on a football competition. These are reals which apparently had not been available for schools, hospitals, public services and wages, and which then magically appeared. It’s a bit like here in Britain, when it comes to money for war. Suddenly there’s loads of it.

The people were incensed and for a while, Brazil’s cities were in flames. Strikes paralysed transport systems. Schools shut down. 

Then the spectacle of the World Cup competition got under way and the Brazilians’ love of their national game recaptured them. The White House breathed a sigh of relief. 

A subsequent embarrassing collapse of the national team on home turf jolted them awake but with a collective hangover and they slumped back into a dark place. 

Elections, as here in Britain, come and go and nothing fundamentally changes. Real change will happen when the Brazilian people dramatically re-enter their history. When they do, it will take more than a football competition or carnival to distract them.