On Sunday 27 October, the leader of the PT (Workers’ Party), Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, aged 54, will probably be confirmed as the next president of Brazil. It will be his fourth consecutive attempt to lead the biggest (8.5 million km²) and most populous (169 million inhabitants) country in Latin America.
After winning the electoral first round on 6 October with 46% of the 94 million votes (a turnout of 82%), Lula may now reach 60% in the second round, according to the latest opinion polls; while his opponent, José Serra, from the PSDB (the Brazilian social democrat party) – who is supported by the current president, Fernando Henrique Cardoso – will have around 30%.
A Lula victory would have a huge symbolic impact in Brazil. The trajectory of a man who migrated as a child with his family from the impoverished Brazilian rural north-east to industrial São Paulo, worked as a street vendor, became a metalworker after completing a technical course, and now reaches the Presidency of the Republic, would be a dramatic journey indeed in a country with one of the worst ratios of income distribution in the world, and few opportunities for social mobility.
But Lula’s triumph would be also be a landmark in Brazilian politics as well as a personal saga. Lula was the key figure in the birth of the new union movement in the 1970s. After launching a militant career as a trade unionist under the influence of his eldest brother, he led strikes in the car manufacturing region of São Paulo against the military government which ruled Brazil from 1964–1985. This movement undermined the authoritarian regime and led to the democratisation process of the 1980s.
In 1980, Lula and the new unionism were at the epicentre of the foundation of the Workers’ Party (PT), a unique left-wing experience in Latin America. The party brought together grassroots urban and rural movements, university professors, activists from the Catholic Church, and Marxist and Trotskyist groups opposing the Soviet model. Since its beginnings, PT has rejected the country’s traditional left-wing paths – populism and communist bureaucratic parties – and has preached radical democracy, social justice and human rights.
However, while all this is true now, it was also the case in 1989, 1994 and 1998, when Lula and the PT lost the elections against centre-right alliances. So what has brought about this new promise of success in the 2002 campaign?
Centrism and pragmatism
If the metalworker does win Sunday’s elections, his vice-president will be an industrialist. José Alencar, who belongs to the PL (Liberal Party), a small centre-right party, is a businessman from the textile sector in Minas Gerais, in the developed Brazilian south-east. This alliance, unthinkable eight years ago, exemplifies both the movement that PT has made towards the centre and its electoral pragmatism.
With social inclusion as its main appeal, Lula’s programme promises to achieve this without abandoning the Cardoso government’s economic tools, such as its inflationary goals, economic stability and fiscal responsibility. The aim is to promote growth, protect national industries and create jobs, within the framework of a market economy. If the PT attacks the current internal debt and high interest rates, this is a critique shared by conservative economists and right-wing politicians. The party and its leader have preached the need to reform the model, rather than sweep it to one side.
This approach has proved to be in harmony with the feelings of the electorate. Last August, for example, Lula, who had advocated the suspension of external debt payments during his 1989 campaign, supported the agreement between the Brazilian government and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which is anticipating a loan of US$ 30 billion to the country. This shift, manifesting concern for economic stability, scored points with the electorate and consolidated Lula’s leadership in the opinion polls.
The movement towards the centre has been a gradual process in the PT. Their accumulated experience of local government, for instance, has contributed to a pragmatic political mentality in the party, which contrasts with an earlier more dogmatic and idealistic stance. In 1994, before the start of the campaign, when Lula’s victory seemed unstoppable, sectors of the PT who reckoned that Lula would need a broad political base in the Parliament to govern the country, tried to push the party into a dialogue with the PSDB. But the offer was rejected. The social democrats formed an alliance with conservative forces and jointly defeated Lula.
After losing three consecutive elections, representative sectors of the party realised that the PT had to revaluate its strategy. This was the point at which José Dirceu, Lula’s right-hand man and certainly a key figure in any future PT government, began to lead the movement for change in the party. Dirceu, who led the student movement in São Paulo in the 1960s, was exiled during the military regime and only re-elected to the Parliament two weeks ago. Lula’s and Dirceu’s faction in the PT, Articulação, has now isolated the more radical groups, gaining the hegemony necessary in party assemblies to promote and shape, for example, the controversial alliance with the PL.
Lula’s new pragmatic approach has its own pragmatic campaign style. The PT hired one of the principal experts in political marketing in Brazil, Duda Mendonça, who used to work for conservative candidates. Mendonça became famous in 1996, when he helped to elect a rather dull and politically inexperienced technician as mayor of São Paulo, defeating the other contender on that occasion, José Serra. Following Mendonça’s advice, Lula started wearing fashionable suits, changed his haircut and even occasionally sports a pair of glasses – an effort to present the candidate as somebody able to manage the country.
The red colour that used to dominate Lula’s campaign material was replaced by a blue sky with stars and the green and yellow Brazilian flag. Lula has also reshaped his discourse, which is now much more conciliatory and affirmative, replacing the critical tone and direct attacks of the past elections. With the new style, the sapo barbudo (bearded frog) that the country’s elites found so hard to swallow in 1989 has gained a new nickname in 2002: Lulinha paz e amor (little Lula peace and love). The metamorphosis has paid off. Opinion polls show that to attack an opponent in this campaign is as harmful as being attacked, since this leads to increased levels of rejection by the electorate.
Having got this far, Lula was decisively helped by the political context. Since June, it has been reasonably clear that he would have no problem reaching the second round. The toughest contest of the whole campaign was the one between the three other main candidates to reach the final round with the petista. Without any direct challenges, Lula cruised through the campaign, maintaining his traditional and consolidated left-wing base and expanding this to include the middle ground of the electorate. Meanwhile, the other three fought against each other to survive. In the end, Lula and the PT almost won the elections in the first round, receiving double the number of votes cast for José Serra.
The split of the right
The PT’s success is also directly related to the split in the centre-right alliance, which sustained the Cardoso government for eight years. Cardoso had been able to reconstitute in his government the broad coalition that defeated the candidate of the military regime in the 1985 electoral college, which chose the first civilian president in twenty-one years. This alliance gave him the parliamentary support needed to govern the country and, moreover, to overhaul the economic foundations of Brazil.
Agreement among these political forces was based on a certain common agenda, but it also helped traditional Brazilian local bosses to retain their regional structures of power. After two terms in power, this coalition has lost momentum. With the prospect of an imminent end to the Cardoso era, the discussion about his successor has highlighted its rifts rather than its common ground. Leaders of Cardoso’s PSDB, among them José Serra, have become increasingly antagonistic towards the PFL – a party composed of local bosses and orthodox liberals – which was an important pillar in the government and crucial for the president’s electoral victories.
In the first half of this year, when the final list of candidates for government was not yet complete, the PFL accused the government and Serra of orchestrating a national scandal against its most popular leader, Roseana Sarney, governor of the north-east Maranhão state and daughter of the former president José Sarney. Her candidacy ruined, the PFL left the Cardoso coalition, Serra consolidated himself as the government candidate, and an organic alliance with the PFL under his leadership for the 2002 campaign became impossible. As the party did not have a candidate for this election, its leaders were free to choose other candidates to support – among them Lula.
Moreover, Serra has not clearly associated himself with the legacy of the Cardoso government, which, despite the problems, put an end to inflation and currently enjoys a popular approval rating of around 35%. Serra, an economist and senator known in Brazil as a poor campaigner who lacks charisma, has occupied two Ministries in the last eight years: Planning and Health. Having supported a more developmental approach opposed to the strict monetarism supported by Cardoso, he has had several highly publicised arguments with the Economy Minister, Pedro Malan, the strong man of the Cardoso period.
On plenty of occasions over the last months, Serra’s discourse sounded more like that of a member of the opposition than a government supporter. Cardoso had little influence over his campaign. All four main candidates – Lula, Serra and the populists from smaller left-winger parties, Ciro Gomes and Anthony Garotinho – were thus, albeit in different tones and approaches, preaching change. It is still too soon for a definitive conclusion, but it could be argued that already in such a scenario a more conservative voter who seeks continuity, but sees some room for improvement, could get lost and go to any side.
Brazil’s democracy: not an event but a process
‘I changed. Brazil changed’, Lula has repeated over and over during this campaign. He is probably right. The present Brazil is a very different country from the one in 1989 when Lula competed in the first direct presidential election after the military regime. At that time, by the second round, the possibility of a Lula victory sparked off rumours that the generals would take back power, provoked distorted media coverage in favour of his opponent, stimulated speculation that hundreds of thousands of businessmen would leave the country and made whole sectors of the middle class believe scare stories to the effect that a PT government would force them to share their flats with the families of the poor. Lula lost that second round.
In 2002, Lula’s (almost certain) victory will carry much symbolism and political impact, but, overall, it has come to be seen as a normal part of the game. The petista counts on the support of businessmen and conservative local leaders, has an open channel of dialogue with the military, and Cardoso has already promised to agree on a common team to manage a smooth transition. Whatever the result might be on Sunday, this electoral campaign has marked the consolidation of the Brazilian democratic system, which may be seen as a process rather than an event.
Cardoso’s government was initially successful in ending inflation, a requirement for political and economic stability. But ultimately it could not lead the country to sustainable economic growth and social justice. In this context, the decision of an electorate confirming the new centrist Lula as the next president could be interpreted as the wish for a healthy rotation of power in a democracy that has been governed for eight years by the same political forces. The average voter ‘wants change’, but is not prepared to face a dramatic rupture.
But if Lula wins, he will face huge challenges: restructuring the country’s finances, promoting growth, investing in social programmes, reforming the tax system, managing the expectations of its political base, preventing his party’s internal struggles from having an influence on the government, among many others. In the end, he will succeed or fail. It is part of the democratic game, a path to which Brazil is increasingly committed.
