With the “strength of the people”, this month President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva starts the electoral race with the aim of winning a second term. The slate headed by Lula is a coalition formed by PT, PCdoB, and PRB. PSB, though not formally joining the coalition, declared its support to the ticket.


The strength of the people
In chorus with the right
The campaign in the states

The strength of the people

With the “strength of the people”, this month President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva starts the electoral race with the aim of winning a second term. The slate headed by Lula is a coalition formed by the Workers Party (PT), the Communist Party of Brazil (PCdoB), and the Brazilian Republican Party (PRB) of vice-presidential candidate José Alencar. The Brazilian Socialist Party (PSB), though not formally joining the coalition, declared its support to the ticket.

Although there are six other candidates, little less than three months away from the ballot, the situation today remains unaltered, with a programmatic polarization between Lula and the candidate of the Party of the Brazilian Social Democracy (PSDB), Geraldo Alckmin, in an alliance with the Liberal Front Party (PFL).

Opinion polls published by Datafolha and Vox Populi polling agencies, in late June, show that the level of support to the reelection of President Lula has stabilized, ranging between 45% and 46% of voting intentions. The PSDB candidate, who climbed a few percentage points over the last month probably on account of the increased media coverage he received with the official launching of his candidacy and his party’s TV campaign, is preferred by 29% to 32% of the electorate. Although these figures still point to Lula’s victory in the first round of the election, there is no reason to underestimate Alckmin’s growth potential, a candidacy endorsed by the Brazil’s most important capitalists and the top representatives of the communications industry.

The candidacies of Heloísa Helena (Socialism and Freedom Party – PSOL), Cristovam Buarque (Labour Democratic Party – PDT), Luciano Bivar (Social Liberal Party – PSL), José Maria Eymael (Christian Social Democratic Party – PSDC) and of Rui Pimenta (Party of the Working-class Cause – PCO) all together do not add up to 10% of the voting intentions of the entire electorate. And the PMDB finally made the decision not to launch its own candidate after a long period of studied hesitation.

The expression “with the strength of the people”, Lula’s slogan for the campaign, is not just a marketing ploy designed to confer a popular appeal to the petista. The result of the Vox Populi survey based on open ended questions to determine voting intentions for the universe of low-income electors (a minimum wage of 350 reais) shows that Lula has the preference of 61%; in this segment Geraldo Alckmin has a mere 16% of voting intentions.

But why is it that the low-income population is with Lula? According to Marcos Coimbra, a pollster with Vox Populi, in an interview to Carta Capital magazine, “the poor are voting in Lula because they are convinced that his administration was good and may, in a second term, make their lives better off. In the qualitative polls conducted throughout the country I perceive that the poor manifest their intention of voting in the government not only because there is a social program called Family Allowance. That is just a part of it, a symbol of the government’s achievements. In addition to that, they see the price of those absolutely essential goods stable or falling and construction material becoming cheaper”.

Though both candidates have votes scattered in every social stratum, “no doubt, the unprecedented consolidation of votes for Lula in the poorest layers [of society] shows a clear-cut income cleavage in the electoral process. By extension, a social-class clash bias”, remarks Coimbra.

The main conflicting points as regards the programs of the popular camp represented by Lula’s candidacy and of the capital sector represented by Alckmin are the type of economic growth pursued, the roles of the State and the private sector, the debate over whether resource allocations to social programs are expenditures or investment, the broadening of democracy in favor of popular sectors, and foreign policy.

The PSDB-PFL coalition assumes that the powerhouse of Brazilian growth is the private sector which, to fulfill that role, should benefit from tax breaks and State incentives, all in the name of reducing the “Brazil cost”. In practice, that means reducing what they call “social spending”.

The debate surrounding “spending” or “investment” as applied to social policies constitutes the core of the programmatic confrontation, among other reasons, because it helps clarify in a didactic way the type of growth the Lula candidacy upholds, and which social sectors his platform benefits and prioritizes.

In an interview to the Cultura TV network, at the Roda Viva program, Alckmin summarized his proposals for the economy as slashing spending and boosting investment to stimulate GDP growth. He did not, however, specify the expenses he intends to cut in case he is elected, and merely repeated the rhetoric he has been using for months: “I want to deliver a management shock” and “enhance efficiency”.

During the opening ceremony of the XIII Workers Party National Meeting in April, President Lula stated that “behind the ‘management shock’ rhetoric lies a cut in social investing, the end of real increases for the minimum wage, and a reduction in social security benefits”. And concluded: “What Brazil needs is a social inclusion shock”.

In chorus with the right

The candidacies of Senator Heloísa Helena and of Cristovam Buarque may be categorized as what journalist Wladimir Pomar, in an article titled “Cross-eyed looks” and published in the Correio da Cidadania newspaper, termed as “the weeping left”. Though not mentioning any names, the fact is that both candidates were, as he says, entangled with the PSDB and the PFL “in denouncing the alleged systemic corruption of the Lula administration, assuming that that would bleed the government and the PT to death. Faced with a different reality, they fall into discouragement because those political currents of the bourgeoisie cannot afford just to keep going on and on with the same story”.

Heloísa Helena, with 6% of voting intentions in the electoral polls, is in the presidential race for the P-SOL, a party founded in late 2005 by a majority of PT dissidents.

In an interview to magazine Carta Capital, former petista Plínio de Arruda Sampaio had to explain the tone of the criticisms made by the senator against Lula’s term in office. Asked about why Heloísa Helena “is more engaged in making a moralist speech rather than presenting herself as an alternative further to the left”, Sampaio contended that he was under “the impression that it was a circumstantial speech. The situation was so dramatically grave, the crisis so huge, that it made no sense to talk about anything else. Heloísa Helena responded to the situation and expressed her outrage. For the campaign we will change. We will adopt a more ideological tone.”

With only 1% of the Brazilian electorate’s preference, the candidacy of yet another former petista, Cristovam Buarque, today in the PDT and until very recently Lula’s minister of education, also sounds as in chorus with the speech of the rightwing coalition when it comes to criticizing the Lula administration.

In the opposite direction, dissatisfied with the political line adopted by the PDT, journalist, writer, and historic Brazilian left militant Arthur José Poerner withdrew from that party to affiliate to the PT. In a letter addressed to his former party chairman, Poerner says that “the Lula administration, in spite of the defects, failures, and omissions that it might be attributed, is not our enemy; he is, rather, the national advance possible given the present internal and external contexts. Not reelecting him means, in practice, to return the power to the elites which impede the emancipation of our people ever since the times of slavery (…)”.

In an interview to the PT Portal, the intellectual reasons that, just as in 1964, after the coup, when he joined the Brazilian Communist Party because he believed that was a path to resistance, he believes now that the path to develop Brazil is the continuity of the Lula administration. “Not only for Brazil as a country, but for Latin America as well. I think that with the Lula administration we have begun a new attempt to integrate Latin America, especially with the administrations of (Néstor) Kirchner, in Argentina and of (Hugo) Chávez, in Venezuela, which will be interrupted if Lula is not reelected. Any other different vote will only split the left, will only contribute to the slight chances the toucans (the social democrats) have in this election”, he sustains.

Poerner is surprised that certain parties “who claim to be leftist, have jumped onto the ‘mensalão’ bandwagon, onto this moralist campaign…. Irregularities must have occurred, surely, but they have let themselves be carried by this moralist wave, the same way the left was lured in 1954 by the so-called “sea of mud” against Getúlio (Vargas), without proper consideration of all the rest. Sure the Brazilian system has many loopholes, oversight is flawed; in every party, every branch of the Republic, there are loopholes that favor irregularities. But we must view the whole picture. And that’s what certain leftist parties cannot acknowledge.”

To Wladimir Pomar, actually “what we are witnessing are the same cleavages that have fractured the left in our history’s past. Fractures that have helped the right to impose heavy losses on the left as a whole and to consolidate its dominance. Without learning from the past, many are unable to look at the present in a less biased fashion. They combat the wrong enemy, just like have done the Landless Workers Movement (MST) Luddites and the provocateurs of the MLST, and are still doing those who put the PT, the PSDB, and the PFL on the same side. They mistake allies for enemies, and shoot at the first believing they are hitting the second.”

The campaign in the states

The institutional and social conditions necessary for a second term to be better than the first are, among others, the election of a broader congressional representation than today’s to back up the next mandate, and the election of more allied state governors, particularly in those states with larger populations and more economic strength.

The PT will run for the government of 18 states and will have the vice-governor in another five states. The states in which the PT is presenting a gubernatorial candidate are: Alagoas, Amapá, Rondônia, Rio Grande do Sul, São Paulo, Sergipe, Rio de Janeiro, Piauí, Pará, Mato Grosso do Sul, Paraná, Santa Catarina, Minas Gerais, Bahia, Pernambuco, Acre, Mato Grosso, and the Federal District. In all of them, the vice-governors come from other parties, in the following proportion: five from the PCdoB, five from the PSB, two from the PMDB, two from the PL, one from the PTB, one from the PP, one from the Green Party, and one from the PTdoB.

States where the PT is providing the vice-governor are: Ceará, Goiás, Maranhão, Paraíba and Tocantins. There are still three other states in which the PT does not take part in the slate. In Roraima it is formally endorsing the candidacies presented, and in the other two (Espírito Santo and Amazonas), it is lending informal support.

In the race for the Senate, the PT has its own candidates in 10 states and is backing up names from other parties in the remaining states.

In a greater part of the Brazilian states, the programmatic polarization between the PT and the PSDB-PFL reappears as in São Paulo, Rio Grande do Sul, Santa Catarina, Minas Gerais, Sergipe, Pernambuco, Paraíba, Ceará, Pará, Amapá, Roraima, and Mato Grosso do Sul. In Santa Catarina, the PSDB and the PFL have the support of the PMDB and the PPS. In the states of Pará and Roraima, the PFL and the PSDB are formally allied with the PL, the PTB, and the PP.

In some of the federation’s units, however, the PFL and the PSDB have not formed coalitions and opted for launching separate gubernatorial candidates, but still have the PT as their adversary. It is the case, among other examples, of the state of Rio de Janeiro, where the PFL is backing the candidacy of Judge Denise Frossard (PPS) and Eduardo Paes, from the PSDB, is running singly. Also, in the states of Maranhão, Amazonas and Mato Grosso the PSDB and the PFL will run as adversaries.

As to the PMDB, which on account of the so-called verticalization (presidential coalition ruling all the other alliances) has decided not to launch their own presidential candidate and strengthen its local constituencies, will have 16 own gubernatorial candidates in the upcoming October elections, distributing its support mainly between the PT and the PSDB. In some of the country’s chief electoral colleges, however, the party has opted for submitting “independent” candidacies with regard to the PT-PSDB polarization.

In São Paulo, the local PMDB formalized the candidacy of former governor Orestes Quércia, who composed a slate with the PP. In Rio de Janeiro, the party nominated Sérgio Cabral, with his vice-governor coming from the PP, and in Rio Grande do Sul, the party’s candidate is incumbent governor Germano Rigotto, with a vice-governor from the PTB.

The party will also run with own candidates in the states of Amazonas, Espírito Santo, Goiás, Mato Grosso do Sul, Pará, Paraíba, Piauí, Paraná, Rio Grande do Norte, Rondônia, Roraima, Santa Catarina and Tocantins.