São Paulo’s Avenida Paulista is a monument to money: The wide avenue is lined with the solid concrete and glass towers of giant banking corporations. But on October 27, election night, a sea of red flags lapped at the doors of the banks as thousands of supporters of the victorious PT (Workers Party) waited for their hero, chanting campaign slogans. When Lula appeared on a giant screen making his acceptance speech men and women wept with joy—and disbelief. Was this really happening? After 13 years and three failed attempts was Luis Inacio Lula da Silva really president of Brazil? Had the left wing finally come to power after 500 years of rule by the elite, the military, the landowners, the bankers?
In the days following the election Lula was mobbed wherever he went. Papers ran stories about “Saint Lula,” and sociologists began explaining the mysticism that already surrounds the man who like millions of other Brazilians began life in abject poverty, but is now president-elect of the world’s fourth largest democracy and tenth largest economy.
It is not just Lula’s personal charisma that has made Brazilians weep. As one of Brazil’s oldest and most influential “developmentalist” economists Celso Furtado, explained, “It’s a relief for many people to be able to believe in something.” Veteran communists in their 70s and 80s said they had given up hope that this moment would ever come, that they would still be alive to enjoy the victory of a left-wing candidate. The last elected left-wing president in Latin America was Chile’s Salvador Allende—whose government was bloodily ended by a U.S.-backed coup in 1973.
Yet Lula’s victory was the culmination of a meticulously planned campaign to convince the voters that a vote for Lula was not a vote for a radical, left-wing president. At meeting after meeting with bankers and businessmen, brokers and investors, Lula and PT leaders pledged themselves to honor existing government commitments, both external and internal, and maintain the budget surplus demanded by the IMF. Their word was underlined by their new image: well cut suits and neatly trimmed beards.
What wooed Brazil’s business community is the conviction that it is time for a change, and Lula is the only man who has the key to unlock the process. While alarmist rumors overseas about Lula’s lack of experience sent shares plummeting and Brazil’s currency, the real, plunging, businesspeople agreed with the PT’s analysis that “the external vulnerability of the Brazilian economy is the result of the [present] government’s errors; instead of growth, it adopted a model which has left Brazil stagnating and dependent on volatile international liquidity, so that each new turbulence means new loans are needed.”
Instead the PT proposed an alternative economic model based on growth to create jobs and lesser dependence on foreign capital. At the moment 1.7 million people, almost 20% of the working population, are out of work in São Paulo alone, and an annual base rate of 21% inhibits productive investment.
The international press refused to be sidetracked by Lula’s newfound credibility with Brazil’s businessmen, and continued to sniff eagerly at each statement or declaration for signs of debt default. Ignoring this pressure, Lula has refused to make premature announcements about the names of the new Central Bank president or finance minister to “calm the markets” but instead asserted that his real priority is the social debt, beginning with his personal passion: that every Brazilian has the right to three good meals a day. In his very first speech as president-elect he announced the “zero hunger program.” At least 22 million live below the poverty line in Brazil, and some studies claim the real figure is more like 50 million, or almost a third of the population. There is debate within the PT about the methods to be used—food coupons, income support, the enlargement of existing community programs—but no doubt whatsoever about Lula’s personal commitment to eliminating hunger, inspired by his own history.
One of eight children, Lula was just seven years old when he set out with his family to travel hundreds of miles south in the back of a lorry, leaving the drought-stricken Northeast in search of a better life in São Paulo. With the first money he earned as a shoeshine boy his older brother Chico remembers him buying a bread roll of mortadella and devouring it with huge satisfaction. But of course Brazil’s social problems are more complex than just giving people food. Debt slavery still exists, not only in the Amazon but in wealthier regions. The big cities are time bombs of violence, where the lack of prospects and jobs for the youth of the favelas provides drug barons with ready-made armies of recruits, and the murder rate among young people is higher than it is in the war zones in other continents.
Lula says he will provide a network of job creation initiatives, leisure, culture and protection for the vulnerable population. He has also promised to tackle Brazil’s unacknowledged racial discrimination by offering quotas for university places. And for the country’s 4.5 million landless families, 100,000 of them camped on roadsides, Lula has declared he will carry out peaceful land reform. He is optimistic about his chances of achieving these changes, saying “The problem is more political than economic.”
During his various election campaigns, Lula crisscrossed Brazil in “caravans,” talking and listening to local people, organizations, interest groups. He probably knows the country better than any other politician. He says he will take his ministers on regular trips to Brazil’s poorest regions so that whenever they have to make a decision, they will remember that the country is made of men, women and children, and not just cold statistics. They will seek a balance between IMF targets and social commitments.
He has also promised that dialog and negotiation will be the hallmarks of his presidency. A Social and Economic Council with an advisory role has already been installed, with representatives from the business community, the unions, and non-governmental organizations.
For former president Jose Sarney, Lula is recapturing a Brazilian tradition because “our entire history has been marked by the search for solutions that will avoid confrontation.” In fact the arrival of a former factory worker and trade union leader with little formal education in power in the largest country in Latin America is taking place without a tremor from the traditional practitioners of rupture and violence: the military, the landowners, the bourgoisie. Among some of the evangelist churches who backed the government candidate, Jose Serra, wild rumours did circulate that Lula intended to close down their temples and abolish inheritance laws. But outgoing President Fernando Henrique Cardoso has opted for a “civilized” transition, with the incoming officials given full access to government information and data, not by any means standard practice in Brazil, which in the last 40 years has not seen a single elected president hand over power to another elected president. Instead coups, resignation, impeachment, or fatal illness have dogged Brazilian presidents since the 1960s.
At the same time, Lula’s victory is not just the victory of a charismatic man, at a time when Brazil is ripe for change. For he comes to power at the head of a political project that began among striking automobile factoryworkers in São Paulo’s ABC industrial zone, but spread all over Brazil to become the estuary of the dreams and aspirations of millions, from the Rio Grande to the Amazon. For 20 years PT militants have organised, campaigned, debated and denounced. In dusty frontier towns, in landless peasants’ camps and settlements, in universities, in church halls, in women’s groups they have carried the flame for political freedom, social justice, income redistribution, land reform, sometimes at the cost of their lives or their jobs.
The PT is the first large party created from the bottom up, rather than the top down, the first grassroots party ever to reach power in Brazil, based not on populism but on a solid structure of participation and internal democracy. It runs 180 out of Brazil’s 4,000 or so municipalities, and has won a disproportionate number of awards for its social projects. It is the only party which has always relied on elected members donating 20% of their salaries, and on membership fees to raise funds, rather than donations from big business. The main internal division is between the moderates who dominate the party and have led the move to adopt more social democratic-style policies and the minority of hard left radicals who want to see a more aggressive socialist agenda. The influence of Catholic liberation theologians has always been stronger in the party than that of Marxist-Leninists.
But the PT’s appeal to the population has much more to do with pragmatism than ideology. Brazilians voted for Lula and the PT because they identify it with two things they desperately want: change and honesty. Since the end of military rule in 1985, corruption scandals have led to the impeachment of a president, the resignation of the senate president and countless other exposures involving politicians at all levels. The PT has kept its hands clean.
Founded in 1980, the PT has now emerged from the last elections as the largest party in the Chamber of Deputies, with 91 deputies out of the total of 513. In the Senate it doubled its numbers, and now has 14 out of 85 Senators. It has elected large numbers to state assemblies. The one area where it has failed to do well is at the state level, where regional politics tend to override party affiliations. It has elected only three out of 27 state governors.
For Latin America, the importance of Lula’s victory cannot be underestimated. A few Cold War warriors might like to shake their heads over a new “Axis of Evil”—Brazil, Cuba, Venezuela—but in the region, his election is seen as a sign of hope that could lead to better days after decades of lost opportunities and economic social and political crises. Brazilians opted for change by peaceful means—by the democratic process, not guerilla warfare or terrorism. The PT has gained power by the vote, a clean vote, not by corruption or violence.
In the view of sociologist Emir Sader, it signals the beginning of the end of neoliberal policies in the region, which after the initial stabilization, have left behind weakened economies, fragile and indebted. If Lula’s first months are seen as a success, it will undoubtedly influence elections in neighbouring Argentina and Uruguay. Lula has committed himself to strengthening Mercosur, and through the creation of a free trade zone with the European Union, to building a counterweight to the proposed Free Trade Area of of the America, FTAA. At the moment, the FTAA “means annexation by the United States, not integration” in the words of Lula. This point of view is shared by Brazil’s most influential federation of industries, FIESP, which concluded in a recent study, that FTAA would bring Brazil more risks than opportunities.
In the meantime, as they wait for President Lula to take office, many Brazilians are taking hope from Lula’s words: “We will begin by doing what’s necessary, then do what’s possible, and one day wake up and find we’re doing the impossible.”
ABOUT THA AUTHOR
Jan Rocha is a British journalist who has lived in Brazil for over 30 years. She is the author of Cutting the Wire, the Story of the Landless Movement in Brazil (Latin America Bureau, 2002) and several other books on Brazil. She was a reporter for the BBC World Service and correspondent for the Guardian newspaper.
