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ISR Issue 50, November–December 2006


N E W S & R E P O R T S

BRAZILIAN ELECTIONS

The left versus Lula

By LEE SUSTAR

LULA LOOKED set to win reelection as president of Brazil October 29—but this time as the scandal-plagued lesser-evil, rather than the candidate of hope and progress that he claimed to be when he first won the office four years earlier.

President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva—better known since is days as a metalworkers’ union leader as simply Lula—gained 48.79 percent of the vote October 1, short of the 50 percent plus 1 he needed to avoid a runoff election. His main rival, Geraldo Alckmin, got 41.43 percent of the vote as the candidate of the Brazilian Social Democratic Party (PSDB, according to its initials in Portuguese; despite the party’s name, it’s a center-right party).

Lula fell short of a first-round win mainly because of Heloísa Helena, who won 6.85 percent as the candidate of the Party of Liberation and Socialism (PSOL), backed by the Brazilian Communist Party (PCB) and the Trotskyist Unified Socialist Workers Party (PSTU).

A senator from the poor state of Alagoas in northeastern Brazil, Helena was the most prominent of a several legislators from Lula’s Workers’ Party (PT) who were expelled for opposing the government’s pro-business policies. The three-party electoral alliance that backed her campaign, known as the Left Front, formed to give the Left within Brazil’s labor and social movements a way to register their opposition to the PT, which is unraveling amid staggering levels of corruption as it carries out government policies tailored to the demands of Brazilian agribusiness, the banks and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

“The Left Front wants to free the country of the claws of financial capital and imperialism,” the alliance stated.

“This is a front for the workers, the unemployed, the millions of men and women in the informal economy who live and work with great difficulty, the social and political organizations of the workers and the independent activists—in short, all the Brazilians who rebel against corruption and submission to finance capital and the bankers.”

If Lula has served the interest of business rather than workers and the poor, then how did he emerge as a favorite for reelection? A key factor is his government’s cash and food aid program, Family Allowance, which serves eleven million families mainly in the northeast, a region still scarred by slavery, racism, and underdevelopment. The result, as one Brazilian sociologist remarked at a meeting last year, is that the PT became a “rural party,” even as it alienated its traditional supporters in the industrial unions and social movements.

But Lula’s increased aid to the poor—a quarter of Brazil’s population of 181 million—must be seen in the context of the overall government agenda. This has included slashing pensions for public-sector workers by 30 percent and enacting “flexible” labor laws—that is, measures making it easier to fire workers. And although Lula’s government has tripled social spending to $8 billion, priority was given to repaying the country’s $150 billion foreign debt, including loans granted to Brazil’s former military dictatorship.

In foreign policy, the eagerness to please the international financial institutions extends to Wall Street and Washington. While Lula’s Brazil helped foil the Bush administration’s proposals for an extension of NAFTA to a Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), his government wasn’t defending the interests of Latin Americas workers and peasants, but rather the profits of Brazil’s heavyweight agro-exporters who demand an end to U.S. agricultural subsidies as the precondition for any trade deal. Politically and militarily, Brazil has staked out a role as a sub-imperialist power in the Americas, sending troops to help occupy Haiti in the wake of the U.S.-sponsored coup of 2004 and, more recently, squeezing Bolivia economically after the new government of Evo Morales moved to nationalize his country’s hydrocarbon resources.

Meanwhile, land reform—the focus of Brazil’s most powerful social movement, the Landless Workers Movement (MST)—has been minimal. An average of 25,000 families received parcels of land each year under Lula, who had promised that 100,000 families would. By contrast, 48,000 families per year got land under the previous neoliberal government of Fernando Henrique Cardoso.
Overall, Lula’s policies have been to the right of those of populist leaders of Brazil’s past, argues Eric Toussaint, president of the Belgium-based Committee to Abolish Third World Debt and author of Your Money or Your Life: The Tyranny of Global Finance.

“I understand perfectly that [the Brazilian poor] support a president that improves their incomes, although it may be little,” he told an interviewer. “But when it comes to attempting structural economic reform, Lula shows himself to be very reticent. He can’t be compared to Getúlio Vargas (president from 1930 to 1945, and later from 1951 to 1954), nor with Juscelino Kubitschek (president from 1956 to 1961), nor with João Goulart (president from 1961 to 1964). Lula is more conservative.”

Along with the PT’s pro-business policies came a wave of corruption scandals, some involving the PT’s top officials. These range from a vote-buying scheme to win the backing of conservatives in the Brazilian Congress to, on the eve of this year’s election, an attempt by other PT figures to use nearly $800,000 in cash for political payoffs.

Some on the Brazilian left explain all this as evidence of “errors” or “betrayals” by Lula and/or his closest advisers. But as the radical Uruguayan journalist Raúl Zibechi pointed out, “Lula is not a ‘traitor,’ an argument that explains nothing and, with simplistic language, passes over the complexities of the situation—and the fundamental reason that the president of Brazil decided to take a specific road, which can be summarized as a neoliberal model with a ‘human face.” He added: “Bribing scores of representatives is not an ‘error,’ it’s a policy.” Charles-André Udry, a Swiss-based expert on Latin America, made a similar point in an article last year that showed how middle-class elements long ago took over the PT as the party captured the mayor’s office in Sao Paolo and many other cities.

The conservatism and corruption in Lula’s government created widespread demoralization and cynicism among the PT’s historic base. As many of the party’s militants were being forced out of the party or left in disgust, PSOL was founded to preserve the best fighting traditions that had given rise to the PT in the 1980s. Heloísa Helena’s candidacy, with the backing of the PCB and PSTU, then took the case for a left-wing alternative to a mass audience.

Helena got some criticism on the left for her personal opposition to abortion, although she stressed at a press conference that she’s against criminalizing women who have the procedure.
Overall, her campaign stressed concrete demands to improve the lives of workers and the rural poor—including taxing the wealthy and big business to fund job creation, health care, and expanded education and employment for youth.

“What we want is the democratization of the wealth, culture, health and education,” she told a Brazilian reporter. “We are not heirs of the tradition of totalitarian European socialism. I do not defend socialism by decree. I do not want totalitarian socialism, nor only capitalist thinking. In Brazil, capitalism has been very ugly, cruel and violent.”
As the second round of the presidential election approached, some of Helena’s prominent supporters, such as the academic Emir Sader, called for a vote for Lula as a the way to stop a right-wing offensive via an Alckmin administration.
PSOL however, refused to support Lula, arguing that it was time for the Left to stake out its independence.

“Alckmin and Lula are mainstays of an unjust social, economic, and political model, which also implies generalized corruption,” the PSOL national executive wrote in a statement. “This model will keep millions of Brazilians in misery and dependent on government donations, without dignity and without [the prospect] of jobs and of better salaries...

“Whoever is elected, the national political scene is already defined by a conservative alliance of the center right, either with the PT or with the Brazilian Social Democratic Party.... We call on the Brazilian people to trust neither of them, and to be prepared to resist and fight the policies that either one will try to implement after the elections.”


Lee Sustar is a regular contributor to the ISR.
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