Alexandre Fortes

“’Another World is Possible: The Rise of the Brazilian Workers’ Party and the Prospects for Lula’s Government”

In October 2002 Brazil elected as president a former metalworker and founder of a socialist party, a man whose family had left the miserable northeastern hinterland fi ve decades earlier to face prejudice and hardship in industrial Sao Paulo. The election of Luis Inacio “Lula” da Silva of the Workers’ Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores, or PT) was a clear signal that deep changes were going on in a country marked by huge social inequalities and a contempt for manual labor engendered by almost four centuries of slavery. In the fi rst round of the 2002 presidential election, the former trade union leader had received 46 percent of the vote and won in twenty-four of twentyseven states. In the runoff election on October 27, Lula received 52.8 million votes, 61.3 percent of the nationwide total, and won in all but one state. With their vote, Brazilians had overwhelmingly supported a candidate and a party who were harsh critics of the procapitalist orthodoxies of neoliberalism and contemporary globalization. In doing so, Brazilian voters defi ed attempts by Washington, London, and the international fi nancial markets to warn them away from this use of their democratic rights, an attempt at blackmail that failed even though the value of Brazil’s national currency went down by 40 percent between the beginning of 2002 and the October elections. The vote for Lula was more than twice as large, in absolute terms, as the vote given to all other PT candidates for political offi ce. Yet it would be misleading to label this triumph as only personal in nature, since one of the most surprising developments was the jump in overall support for the PT. Although the PT and its allied parties did not win control of the Chamber of Deputies, the PT did become, for the fi rst time, the party with the largest number of deputies (91 of 513 seats) and the only one with representatives from all states, also a fi rst. Thus the 2002 election was both a personal triumph of the candidate Lula and a PT party victory (it also doubled its senators), although the PT did less well in gubernatorial races (winning in only three states) and lost control of Rio Grande do Sul (an area of party strength). C O N T E M P O R A RY A F FA I R S

In Search of a Post-Neoliberal Paradigm: The Brazilian Left and Lula's Government

The first decade of the twenty-first century has seen extraordinary political developments in the Latin American left. Indeed, there is no historical precedent for the simultaneous election across the region of governments that can be identified with the political left. From Tabare Vasquez in Uruguay to Martin Torrijos in Panama; from Nestor and Cristina Kirchner in Argentina to Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua; from Michelle Bachelet in Chile to Hugo Chavez in Venezuela; from Evo Morales in Bolivia to Rafael Correa no Ecuador—as well as Luis Inacio Lula da Silva in Brazil and, more recently, Fernando Lugo in Paraguay—representatives of practically all of the regions formative leftist currents have taken over the governments of large, medium, and small countries.

A "Era Lula", as eleições presidenciais de 2010 e os desafios do pós-neoliberalismo

The article explores the stunning success of the Brazilian Workers Party (PT) and its leader, Lula, former trade unionist, in winning a third consecutive presidential victory, with the election of Dilma Rousseff in 2010. In historical perspective, it examines the ways in which Lulas government (2002-2010) represented a break with the past while summarizing its substantive achievements in redistributing wealth and opportunity. Focusing on the tension between a historic party-centric petismo (declared partisan party support) and the broader personal popularity of its leader (lulismo), it offers evidence that Lula and the PT have retained their foundational ethos of enhancing popular self-esteem while fostering citizen participation and civil society mobilization, albeit under new conditions. It concludes with a diagnosis of Dilma Rousseff governments challenges in light of the international economic scenario, domestic labor mobilizations, and the constraints of the Brazilian political system.