New Leader Gets High Marks for Honesty : Brazil: But critics worry that Franco can be quixotic, abrasive and temperamental.

Soon after Fernando Collor de Mello was elected president in December, 1989, he scheduled a meeting with Itamar Franco, his vice president-elect. Collor kept Franco waiting three hours, then bluntly told him that his opinion wasn’t needed for selecting a Cabinet.

Now, the tables are turned. It is Collor, 43, who is suffering humiliation and the 61-year-old Franco who is riding high. With the president forced Tuesday to accept a suspension after legislators voted to impeach him on corruption charges, the aura of power is glowing around the vice president who is to replace him.

Franco, once a classic example of the overshadowed and unnoticed vice president, for weeks now has been making daily headlines and attracting national, even international, attention. His personality (introverted and somewhat temperamental) is being analyzed, and his vaguely defined ideology (partial to social welfare and nationalism) is being dissected.

Some analysts worry that Franco takes offense too easily, can be abrasive, thinks with little brilliance and speaks without flair. Others predict that he will slow down official efforts to privatize government enterprises, streamline the bureaucracy and open up the Brazilian market to imports.

Virtually everyone agrees that Franco is honest--an important plus amid the corruption scandal that has brought Collor down.

“High morals, honesty, probity are qualifications that are commonly used when referring to Itamar August Cantiero Franco,” said a profile being circulated by Early Warning Consultoria, a risk analysis firm based in Brasilia. But it also says that Franco’s 16-year career in the national Senate “was marked by quixotic, polemic and difficult-to-understand postures.”

As vice president, Franco’s public statements “were often considered clumsy and politically inconvenient,” the profile continues. “Staffers who worked with him during the presidential campaign describe his behavior as mercurial and tempestuous.” Franco threatened to resign several times from the campaign for petty reasons, according to staffers.

“He is fastidious, (a) fuddy-duddy, and he seems to be kind of thin-skinned,” commented Richard Foster, editor of the executive newsletter Brazil Watch.

Franco, meanwhile, has been trying to project himself as solid presidential material, someone this nation of 150 million people can trust. And, of course, he has been considering candidates for a Cabinet. At the same time, he has taken pains to stay in the background, to avoid any improper appearance of eagerness for Collor’s job and to disassociate himself from the corruption accusations against the president.

In a rare interview published in June by the magazine IstoE, Franco was asked if he considered himself a participant in Collor’s government. “No, I never was--and I imagine because of a decision by President Fernando Collor himself,” he said. “He limited himself to passing the presidency to me in his absence from national territory and designating me to carry out one diplomatic mission or another of minor importance.”

Franco tried to dispel the widespread impression that his nationalistic sentiments could stall efforts to reform and modernize Brazil’s economy, the ninth-largest in the world. “Nationalism is not to be confused with xenophobia or with any kind of radicalism,” he said.

Early Warning concludes in its Franco profile that as president, he “is not expected to reverse the modernizing and liberalizing policies adopted by Collor.” But he is likely “to slow down some of the liberalizing policies, cutting the pie into thinner slices.”

Divorced, Franco lives alone with a staff of servants in the official vice presidential residence. He doesn’t drink or smoke, and his favorite entertainments are movies and books. He wears dark-rimmed glasses and keeps his gray hair at collar length.

Franco married journalist Ana Elisa Surerus in 1968. “The marriage was a conflictive relationship by virtue of the difficult temperament of Itamar, and it ended with litigation in 1978, on her initiative,” according to a profile by the Goes & Piquet consulting firm. The couple had two daughters, now 20 and 22.

A civil engineer, Franco operated a construction company in the city of Juiz de Fora in Minas Gerais state, where he grew up, and served as the city’s director of water and sewers before starting his political career.

He was mayor of Juiz de Fora from 1967 to 1971 and again from 1973 to 1974, establishing a reputation as an ethical politician.

Franco belonged to the Brazilian Democratic Movement, the only legal opposition party for many years under the 1964-85 military government. In 1974, he won the party’s nomination for a seat in the national Senate, mainly because more prominent politicians didn’t think the party could win.

But the military government gave the opposition access to free time on television, and the publicity propelled 15 opposition members into the Senate, including Franco. He was reelected to the Senate in 1982 with nearly 2.4 million votes, although he failed to win a campaign for the governorship of Minas Gerais in 1986. Barbosa Lima Sobrinho, president of the Brazilian Press Assn. and co-signer of the petition to impeach Collor, told the magazine Veja: “Itamar has a political resume far superior to Collor’s.”

But he was a lackluster legislator, drawing little national notice. One newspaper reported that of a total of 146 bills sponsored by him, only three were approved.

One of Franco’s bills would have reduced the workday from eight to seven hours with no reduction in pay. In the congressional process of drafting Brazil’s 1988 constitution, Franco voted for protection of national industries, nationalization of mineral rights, agrarian reform, suffrage for 16-year-olds and a government monopoly on distribution of oil products.

Late in his Senate career, as new parties jostled for space on the political spectrum, Franco switched to the small Liberal Party. In 1989, he switched again to Collor’s new National Renovation Party to become Collor’s running mate.