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CHAPTER 1

The evolution of the PT

Brazil's Workers' Party, the Partido dos Trabalhadores or PT, emerged in the wake of a series of major strikes in the late 1970s. These mortally wounded the military dictatorship, which was then given the coup de grâce by huge nationwide mobilizations in 1983 and 1984 (Branford and Kucinski, 2003). The Workers' Party attracted traditionally incompatible groups, including Trotskyists, Leninists, Marxists, Catholics from the liberation wing of the Catholic Church, scarcely literate workers and renowned intellectuals. It was the first mass party in Brazil with predominantly socialist ideas and the only mainstream party with activists and political activity outside electoral periods. The objective was to gain power through a combination of mass mobilization and electoral success, and then to transform the social and political structures so that Brazil would become a country of social equality and social justice.

With the return to civilian rule, the party grew fast, winning elections first at the municipal and then at state level (see Tables 1 and 2). But, even though the party had the country's most charismatic leader in Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a union leader and former industrial worker, it found it tantalizingly difficult to gain the final prize – the presidency.

For many years the closest Lula came to winning was his first attempt, in 1989. At the time popular enthusiasm for him was huge: large rallies were held around the country and well-known singers participated in the music video, used during the free TV slots, which featured one of the most effective political jingles ever thought up, 'Lula Lá'. However, most of the media lined up behind Lula's opponent Fernando Collor de Mello, a member of the ruling elite, and were determined by fair means or foul to ensure that Lula was not elected. TV Globo, at the height of its dominance, staged a live debate between the two candidates and on the following day aired an edited version of the debate that showed Collor's best moments and Lula's worst. This and other similar attempts to manipulate public opinion may well have determined the outcome of the election. It was not the industrial worker, who had sold peanuts on the streets as a child, but Fernando Collor de Mello, the son of a senator and friend of the owner of TV Globo, who became Brazil's first democratically elected president for 29 years.

Lula ran again, unsuccessfully, in 1994 and 1998. He became frustrated and, according to a close aide, fearful of becoming forever the 'also ran'. He decided it was time to change strategy and said he would only stand for the presidency for a fourth time in 2002 if he were given a free hand to run the campaign in his own way and to make whatever alliances he wanted. This was clearly a blow to the party's internal democracy but, such was its thirst for power, Lula got his way.

He set up a modern press office and hired the country's leading expert in political public relations, even though he was not a member of the PT or even sympathetic towards it. Lula's pragmatic approach paid off and he won the election comfortably with over 60% of the vote (see Table 3).

Some analysts believe that the party paid a heavy price. The history lecturer Valerio Acary says that the PT lost its political edge and became, like so many other political parties in Brazil, a machine for promoting its leader: 'The transformation of petismo into lulismo, the personality cult of the great leader, had consequences, with the devaluing of collective and independent organisations, like the trade unions and social movements (Acary, 2014).'

Coalition politics

Winning the election was only half the battle; another huge challenge faced the party when it tackled the tricky problem of how it was going to govern. Until 2003 the PT controlled less than 12% of the seats in the Chamber of Deputies. During Lula's two terms as President, and Dilma's first term, this rose to 16–17% but has now dropped back to less than 14%, by any standards a very low power base from which to lead a stable coalition (see Table 4). It had no choice but to form a coalition. There was – and still is – fierce rivalry between the PT and the PSDB, the third largest party in the Chamber, with 54 deputies.

The PSDB, Partido da Social Democracia do Brasil, Brazil's Social Democratic Party, is a formerly left-leaning party which swung to the right in the 1990s and, during the presidency of the former Marxist sociologist, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, implemented an IMF-backed programme of sweeping privatisations and government cuts.

An alliance with the PSDB was almost unthinkable, so the PT had little option but seek to form a coalition with the PMDB Partido do Movimento Democrático Brasileiro or Brazilian Democratic Movement Party, Brazil's largest party, which has 66 deputies, only three fewer than the PT.

The PMDB or 'physiological' party

The PMDB keeps a strangely low profile: it has not fielded a presidential candidate for 12 years and has no real policies (apart from being broadly in favour of the status quo). It is the party best summed up by a strange yet apt Brazilian word fisiológico (physiological), well defined in 2007 by a US diplomat in an internal State Department cable, made available through Wikileaks: 'a pejorative term denoting a person or party for sale, always seeking personal advantage' (Hunt, 2015). The PMDB is a continuation of the MDB Movimento Democrático Brasileiro or Brazilian Democratic Movement, a party created by the generals during the dictatorship to provide a façade of democracy. The MDB, at the time the only permitted opposition party, was far more successful in the elections than the military had expected and was prepared to tolerate, so in their final decade in power the generals altered the electoral rules to create a solid bloc of support for the pro-government party, Arena (Aliança Renovadora Nacional, National Renovation Alliance). Ironically, after the dictatorship ended, this was the electoral space that PMDB occupied and still occupies, which means that their representation in Congress is always far greater than their electoral strength warrants.

Since the return to democracy in 1985, the PMDB has participated in every government except the disastrous Collor de Mello administration (1990–1992), the demise of which may have been partly provoked by the President's audacity in excluding it. With its slogan, 'the Party of Brazil', it projects an image of benign stability but is seen by many as a distasteful relic of the dictatorship. It is a clever political operator, demanding ministries, jobs and concessions for powerful Congressional groups (such as the ruralistas, the conservative landowning bloc) in return for its support of the government of the day. It has been a real headache for the PT and has long blocked any attempt to carry out much-needed political reform.

Mass mobilization sidelined

The only way to survive without PMDB support in 2002 would have been for the PT to use its considerable mobilizing capacity to organize mass demonstrations in favour of radical political reform. But this would have been a very risky tactic, especially at a time when foreign investors and bankers were very wary of the PT and might have provoked a crisis similar to the one then confronting neighbouring Argentina, which was suffering a severe recession after massive capital flight and a debt default. Moreover, some analysts, like university lecturer Pablo Ortellado, believe that by 2002 the PT was too far down the electoral road to change course. According to him, 'The party made a definitive option to choose the institutional route to power, to stand in elections for mayor, governor, president, to conquer political power. This option had a strong demobilizing impact, particularly at the end of the 1980s. And throughout the 1990s we saw a sharp decline in mobilization, which had been running at a very high level (Ortellado, 2014).'

Indeed, there is nothing to suggest that Lula seriously thought of bringing the masses on to the streets, though some PT politicians were proposing it. For him, the safer route of negotiation meant that he could deploy his considerable bargaining skills, developed while he was a trade union leader. This meant, in practice, that the party had to play by the old rules of the game – and that meant buying votes. Further down the road this tactic, so alien to the PT's genesis, would cost them dearly and implicate them in a series of scandals.

The PT tackles poverty

Once in power, Lula and his advisers began rapidly to move the country away from the extreme neo-liberal policies of the Fernando Henrique Cardoso administration, and to rebuild the state, significantly diminished under the previous government, so that it would re-assert its position at the heart of national decision-making and intervene to resolve the country's social problems (Zibechi, 2014: ch.3). In time, the manner in which this policy was implemented profoundly altered the PT's relationship with social movements, although that was not the intention.

The government defined widespread extreme poverty as the country's most pressing social problem. One of Lula's first measures was to merge several social welfare initiatives into a single programme, called Bolsa Família, under which the poorest families receive monthly cash payments, provided they enrol their children at school. By 2012, the programme had 15 million beneficiaries – about one in every four families (Soares, 2012). Alongside this programme, the PT government also increased the real value of the minimum wage, the benchmark for the wages paid to poorer workers. It went up by almost 50% in a decade, compared with a 25% rise for the average wage over the same period (Loman et al., 2014). Employers were encouraged to register their workers, a legal requirement that until then had been widely flouted. The boom in construction for public infrastructure projects and for private residential blocks, stimulated by the increased availability of mortgages made possible by low inflation, absorbed hundreds of thousands of unskilled workers. With almost full employment in some regions and with a sympathetic government, workers felt more confident in demanding that their rights be respected, including the obligation on the employer to register them.

Inequality of income

The jobs boom allowed many to find a way out of extreme poverty through regular, paid labour. Although these families have made huge strides over the last decade, they are still far from affluent. Indeed, the sociologist Jessé Souza thinks it is misleading to describe them as 'middle class' because they are so different from the established middle class. They have shown extraordinary grit and single-minded dedication, says Souza, struggling against the odds in a labour market characterized by permanent insecurity and intense competition. Even though they have faced considerable prejudice from the wealthier sectors of society, many have succeeded in getting themselves 'included in capitalism', that is, they have become consumers of goods such as televisions, refrigerators and mobile phones.

They have been helped by the networks of support they have created through their extended families and the churches, particularly the rapidly-expanding evangelical churches. Souza says they are today a step above the 'unproductive' and 'doomed' ralé (rabble or lumpen proletariat), which, he says, still account for almost a third of the population, but their standard of living still falls well short of that of the established, largely white middle classes, who emerged during the second half of the 20th century (Souza, 2009: 15–71). He has coined a term for the 30 million new consumers – the classe batalhadora (the struggling class) (Machado, 2011).

The Fundação Getúlio Vargas, a highly respected academic institution, has had a go at calculating the scale of the change in the country's social structure, basing some of its figures on projections, rather than hard data, which is as yet unavailable. It believes that today most – 147.1 million people – of the country's population belong to a broad group composed of the A, B or C classes, that is, people with a monthly income of more than two minimum wages, that is, R$1,448 (US$446, £381) (Neri, 2012). This means that the number of people in this group has nearly doubled from its level of 79.1 million in 2003. To a large extent, this impressive expansion is not due to population expansion or immigration, but comes from lifting people out of poverty; during the same period, the number of people in the group encompassing the D and E classes (that is, with a monthly income of under two minimum wages) fell to 48.9 million, just over half of its combined size in 2003 (ibid.). This remarkable reshaping of the country, achieved in little more than a decade, reduced the level of social inequality in Brazil, with the Gini index falling from 0.553 in 2002 to 0.500 in 2011 (Studart, 2013). Brazil bucked the global trend towards increasing social inequality and this won plaudits for the PT and contributed to Lula's re-election in 2006.

However, social inequality, still running at one of the highest rates in the world, has been lessened, not resolved. Brazil still ranks as the 16th most unequal country in the world (CIA, 2014). Over 16 million people have a per capita income of one real (R$1) a day (Pomar, W, 2014) – in April 2015 1 real was worth about 22p or US$0.34. Another 30 million earn at most 2–3 reais a day (ibid.). As the minimum salary today stands at R$788, or R$26 a day, this means that more than a fifth of the population still lives in poverty or extreme poverty. At the other end of the spectrum, 5,000 individuals each have assets of over R$60 m (US$18.7 m, £12.5 m). They have a total wealth of R$1.7 tn (US$520 bn, £350 bn), which is more than a third of Brazil's 2013 GNP of R$4.8 tn (US$1.5 tn, £1.0 tn) (ibid.). It has been pointed out, that even if inequality were to carry on declining at the same pace as it has over the last decade, it would still take a further 20 years to bring it down to the level current in the USA, itself one of the most unequal countries of the OECD (Loman, 2014).

Social injustice

Moreover, it is questionable whether the poorer classes in Brazil are treated with greater social justice, despite the welcome improvement in their income level. A completely just nation would be one in which the human rights of all people – irrespective of race, gender or income – would be respected equally and they would all have the same access to education, public health and security. This utopia does not exist anywhere but some countries, like the Scandinavian nations and Cuba, come close. Slavery existed longer in Brazil than anywhere else in the Americas and its legacy of racism, gross inequality and lack of social justice is hard to eradicate. The police continue to treat poor people in marginal areas very differently from the rich, with a policy of 'shoot first, ask afterwards'. According to the United Nations, between 2003 and 2009 the police in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo were implicated in at least 11,000 so-called 'resistance killings' – in which the victims were shot after allegedly opening fire on police. Evidence shows that many of these deaths were unlawful killings (Amnesty International, 2013). 'Our police still have blood on their hands, and are allowed to act with impunity as extra-judicial killings remain rife in Brazil's major cities,' said Atila Roque, director of Amnesty International's Brazil office (ibid.). Discrimination against indigenous communities and gay people is also widespread.

Access to education and healthcare

Experts agree that the long-term solution to the violence and to discrimination is improved access to education, greater social mobility and affirmative action. The PT administrations have achieved significant advances. Brazilian children are staying longer at school, though the quality of the teaching often leaves much to be desired. It is easier for poor students to go to university; in 2005, the then Minister of Education, Tarso Genro, created Pro-Uni (Programa Universidade para Todos, University for All Programme), which by 2013 had provided 1.2 million university scholarships for poor students. Quotas have been established for black and poor students at some universities, though this has been controversial. So progress is being made, though more slowly than many Brazilians would like.

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Excerpted from "Brazil under the Workers' Party"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Sue Branford and Jan Rocha.
Excerpted by permission of Practical Action Publishing.
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