Six months away from the elections, the political scenario in Brazil is beginning to take shape. There is a clear polarization between two political and social blocs, one led by the PT (Workers’ Party) and the other, by the PSDB (Brazilian Social Democratic Party).

The Brazilian situation must be examined from a Latin-American context. Since 1999, left-wing and progressive parties have won presidential races in Venezuela, Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Bolivia, and Chile.

Forces opposing neo-liberalism have great chances of victory in several other countries of the continent, Peru and Nicaragua among them. The Brazilian presidential election, which will have enormous impact on the Latin-American context, is due on October 1 (first round) and October 29 (run-off) of 2006.

It is worth noting that the 2006 polls will elect the president of Brazil and state governors, and will not only renew 1/3 of the Senate and the entire Chamber of Deputies-the lower house of Congress-, but also all state legislative assemblies.

Six months away from the elections, the political scenario in Brazil is beginning to take shape. There is a clear polarization between two political and social blocs, one led by the PT (Workers’ Party) and the other, by the PSDB (Brazilian Social Democratic Party). The PT will have President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva running for reelection. The PSDB, who was in the federal government from 1995 to 2002 with Fernando Henrique Cardoso, will run with presidential nominee Geraldo Alckmin, acting governor of the state of São Paulo, whose budget is the second largest in Brazil, has a population of 40 million, and accounts for 21% of the country’s population and for 34% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

The presidential succession picture will only be complete, however, when the Brazilian Democratic Movement Party (PMDB) and the Liberal Front Party (PFL) define whether they will have their own presidential candidates or not, and if they will support one of the candidacies announced.

Bearing on this decision are not only programmatic preferences for the presidential race, but also which options will prove themselves more advantageous in terms of the parties’ performance in state elections.

Should the PMDB and the PFL decide not to launch their own presidential candidates, the PT/PSDB polarization will gain stronger contours, with the outcome of the election tending to be known in the first round.

Late April this year the Workers’ Party will hold its 13th National Meeting to discuss the program and the tactics and policy for the partisan coalition. “The 2006 presidential election will be held in an entirely distinct context from that of the 1989, 1994, 1998, and 2002 elections. The Workers’ Party will run the next election no longer as the opposition, but as a party heading the coalition of political forces that is currently governing Brazil”, singles out a preliminary document by a committee appointed by the party’s national board.

Opinion polls carried out by Datafolha, released on March 19, immediately after the announcement by the PSDB that Geraldo Alckmin had been chosen to be the party’s candidate, show that President Lula is leading with 42% of the electorate’s preference, while the social-democratic candidate comes in second with 23% of the votes. One must note that these results were obtained in a poll including Rio de Janeiro’s former governor, Anthony Garotinho, as the PMDB candidate.

The data reveal that President Lula maintained the support he had from popular sectors and recovered some of the middle-class sectors, and are indicative that the right-wing’s offensive against the PT and the Lula administration that peaked between October 2004 and October 2005, however damaging, was not fatal.

In the municipal elections held in 2004, the opposition won important cities as São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Porto Alegre, Goiânia, and Belém, some of them having been previously governed by the PT for more than one term, as in the case of Porto Alegre, in the state of Rio Grande do Sul.

Early in 2005, the opposition imposed yet another defeat on the government by electing the president of the Chamber of Deputies. In March, the right backed by some of the media, launched a series of attacks that resulted in three Parliamentarian Investigative Committees (CPIs) to investigate alleged irregularities in the Lula administration. Sectors of the opposition talk openly of banning the party and impeaching Lula.

Confident that the damages inflicted on the PT and Lula would be irreversible, the opposition envisaged an easy victory scenario for a center-right, neo-liberal alliance in the 2006 elections. And with this promising outlook for background, had start the dispute within the PSDB to define the party’s presidential candidate. On one side José Serra, on the other Geraldo Alckmin.

Yet the plans of the opposition did not anticipate the reaction staged by the PT and its allies in, at least, two important moments. The first was the massive turnout of some 350 thousand-strong party affiliates in September 2005 to vote in a direct election, the PED, on party board members. Soon afterwards, in November, the government resumed control of the Chamber of Deputies by electing Communist Party of Brazil (PCdoB) representative Aldo Rebelo, to preside over that legislative body.

The PT’s, and Lula’s, comeback surprised the PSDB amidst a fierce internal dispute between the governor of São Paulo, Geraldo Alckmin, and the mayor of the city of São Paulo, José Serra, a dispute that exposed the entrails of the toucans, as PSDB followers are dubbed, after the party’s symbol of the Brazilian bird. The toucans ran the country for eight years with Fernando Henrique Cardoso in the presidency. Today they have the third largest number of seats in Congress and head seven of the 27 states of the Union, Minas Gerais and São Paulo, the two largest states included.

Founded in 1988 by PMDB dissidents, in its statutes the PSDB pledges to undertake a social-democratic project for Brazil. Yet what the country witnessed during the toucan administration at the federal sphere was the implementation of the neo-liberal doctrine, marked by the privatization of public assets, the reduction of investments in social areas and projects, and the subordination of Brazil to America’s interests. Defeated in 2002, the PSDB is the main force opposing the Lula administration.

To the PT, according to a resolution approved at the National Board meeting held in March, ” therefore whoever might have been chosen as the PSDB presidential candidate, the right-wing opposition program would have been the same: resuming the neo-liberal and reactionary agenda, suppression of social and constitutional rights, privatizations and repression against social movements, submission of Brazil to the interests of the United States”.

What the PSDB choice reveals, according to the petista document, “is that its conservative option will present itself undisguised. Geraldo Alckmin, the elites’ preferred candidate, has a clearly conservative and reactionary speech, against which the PT will stand up in defense of democratic, popular, and national interests”.

Two days after the announcement of his nomination at a congress for businessmen, Alckmin stated that “the homeland is the families, religion, customs, [and] tradition”. The toucan had his close association with the ultra-conservative Catholic prelacy Opus Dei revealed by Época magazine.

Alckmin, who claims to be an administrator and pragmatist of much action and little rhetoric, is supported by PSDB economists, who advocate the need for a “shock of capitalism” in the country, allegedly to put in practice principles of efficiency and to combat the State’s money waste, adopting tight public account controls. At the international level, Alckmin’s election could mark a reversal in the cycle of victories of the leftist and progressive forces in Latin America and a boost to the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA).

In recent interviews, Alckmin has been toying with the idea of cutting budgets the areas of health and education, adopting a zero nominal deficit policy, a far-reaching labor reform, and the return of privatizations.

These plans are coherent with 12 years of PSDB administrations at the head of the São Paulo state government. According to data provided by the Workers’ Party representation advisory staff at the São Paulo State Legislative Assembly, from 1998 to 2004, some 1.4 billion reais earmarked for the state’s health area and 4 billion reais, for education, were not invested. That is, in the social area, the PSDB state administration has not invested the resources properly and has even disrespected budgetary provisions established by the Constitution. As in the Fernando Henrique Cardoso administration, the selling of public assets and the outsourcing of services are also trademarks of the Alckmin administration.

Political analysts believe that, in order to dodge accountability, Alckmin will attempt to detach himself from Fernando Henrique Cardoso, whose neo-liberal government is still fresh in the memories of the Brazilian people.

Alckmin will also have to face his greatest challenge, i.e., becoming popular, since he is very little known throughout the rest of the country. And also to secure the PFL’s support, a conservative party that shelters one of the most conservative sectors of Brazilian politics, the coronelista landowners’ oligarchy, who lent their political clout to the governments of José Sarney, Fernando Collor, and Fernando Henrique Cardoso. The PFL’s main exponents are the party’s national president, senator Jorge Bornhausen, and the former governor of Bahia, and senator Antonio Carlos Magalhães.

An all time ally, the PFL declared that it would launch its own presidential candidate with the object of negotiating on more advantageous terms with the PSDB, and managed to secure the vice-presidency in Alckmin’s slate and to bargain for support in states in which the party has strong gubernatorial candidates. The PFL will make demands and make each and every concession worth its price. But eventually it will most likely close a deal with the toucans.

According to sociologist Emir Sader, Alckmin’s nomination could not have been better for the PT: “an adversary of very little popular projection, who forces the lulista campaign to highlight its leftist differential – all that the party needs to propose rescuing the social area in a second presidential term in office”. While the campaign is not expected to be easy, the most likely scenario is a Lula victory.

Battle in the PMDB

Although supporting the Lula administration, the PMDB has in its ranks an opposition group defending a presidential candidate of their own, who would present himself/herself as a “third way” and thus occupy a void space in the center, between the PT and the PSDB.

The pro-government faction, led by the president of the Senate, Renan Calheiros, and senator José Sarney, has been waging a legal battle to keep the party from choosing a candidate. Among other motives, these senators argue against having their own candidate to enjoy freedom of choice in state coalitions.

By the rule of ‘verticality’, upheld thus far by the judiciary, parties are not allowed to form state-level alliances with parties they are confronting in the presidential election. This means that only those parties that do not run in the presidential election will be free to make alliances in the states, according to their local conveniences.

If the PMDB should opt to have its own presidential candidate, it would be motionless in the states. It would not, for instance, make state alliances with the PT and the PSDB, who have their own candidates. Without a presidential candidate, it may receive informal support from those parties and others, and the pro-government group will be free to support the reelection of President Lula.

At stake is, according to PMDB pro-government politicians, electing governors or risk losing the presidential race. When the PMDB ran with its own candidate in two previous elections, it failed. Against Collor, in 1989, Ulysses Guimarães won 3% of the polls. Against Fernando Henrique Cardoso, in 1994, Quércia obtained 4.38% of the ballots. At the Fernando Henrique Cardoso reelection, in 1998, the party did not run for president. In the last election, in 2002, it allied with the PSDB and lost with Serra against Lula.

The strategy of some PMDB pro-government congressmen is to prove that it is best to elect many governors and occupy many seats in Congress in order to accumulate bargaining power to negotiate with whoever is elected president of the Republic. Today the PMDB is the largest party in Congress with 82 representatives and 21 senators; and governs nine states throughout the country.

Undermining the government as a strategy

One of the variables affecting the presidential campaign is the electoral use of the results of the congressional investigations.

So far only one of the three committees installed last year, the one examining the purchase of votes, was concluded; nevertheless, no final report has been approved yet. Two others still linger on: one investigating bingo houses and another one, the Postal Service.

The bingo houses investigation has become instrumental in destabilizing the Lula administration. In the month of March of 2006, the PT filed a petition against the congressional investigation at the Federal Supreme Court (STF), which awarded the party a temporary injunction, arguing its unconstitutionality since it is not investigating the facts that led to its installation. It is unacceptable to have a congressional probe investigating everything and everybody for an indefinite period of time as has been occurring.

In face of the opposition’s maneuvers in the investigations, the PT has defended “a thorough investigation of denunciations regarding illegal, off-the-books campaign funds, including those related to the “Furnas list”, a list containing some of the opposition’s top politicians (Geraldo Alckmin, José Serra, the PFL’s national president, Jorge Bornhausen, PFL federal representative Antonio Carlos Magalhães Neto, among other names), who would have used the slush fund allegedly set up inside that state-owned company by the PSDB and the PFL.

The resolution approved by the Workers’ Party National Board at the last meeting also calls for “the immediate installation of a congressional investigation on the privatizations, which is to trigger an in-depth investigation into the process carried out during the period when the opposition governed Brazil, deepening the society’s knowledge of the damaging nature of that project and of its unethical consequences to the Brazilian state”.