Itamar Franco
Itamar Franco inherited a presidency he had not wanted and left office with the currency Brazil still uses. He was Collor's vice-president, chosen to balance the ticket, and had broken with him more than a year before the impeachment. He was a senator from Minas Gerais, an engineer by training, nationalist in economics and suspicious of the privatisations he was now expected to continue. He assumed the office in October 1992 with the country in recession and inflation above a thousand per cent a year. His first two finance ministers failed. The third was his foreign minister, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, a sociologist with no economic portfolio, who assembled a team of academics and produced the Real Plan. It worked in stages through 1993 and 1994: a balanced budget, then an index unit that everything was priced in for four months while the old currency circulated, then the conversion of that unit into a new currency in July 1994. Inflation fell from about fifty per cent a month to under two. Franco's own contribution was to let it happen and to defend it politically, which was not nothing - the previous six plans had failed and every one had involved a freeze or a confiscation, and this one used neither. He also held a referendum in 1993 in which Brazilians chose to keep a republic and a presidency rather than a monarchy or a parliamentary system. The plan made his finance minister president. Cardoso won the election of 1994 outright in the first round. Franco went on to be ambassador in Lisbon, governor of Minas Gerais, and a senator again shortly before his death in 2011.
- Lived: 1930 CE – 2011 CE
- Nationality: Brazilian
- Roles: head_of_state, politician
