The gridlocks to be overcome by Lula’s second term, the political alliances, the new composition, Lula and the PT and III Workers’ Party Congress are the issues on the newsletter’s last edition of the year

The gridlocks to be overcome by Lula’s second term
Political alliances
New composition
Lula and the PT
III Workers’ Party Congress

The gridlocks to be overcome by Lula’s second term

Important political initiatives were taken by the Lula administration and the Workers’ Party in the very first month after Brazil’s presidential elections.

The PT National Board called the party’s III National Congress for July 2007 and the government has already started preparations of a package to try to make the country grow at a 5-percent annual rate. In this second term, the president has vowed to place more emphasis on increasing public investment and on swifter project execution in the areas of energy and transportation. It also hints at reducing taxes, mainly those levied on investments.

Lula has demanded from his team what he termed “unlocking the economy”, which means raising the investment capacity of the public sphere at the federal, state and municipal levels; unburdening economic sectors capable of leveraging growth; and increasing productive capacity, without inflationary pressure.

Soon after the elections, conservative sectors of the society, the media and even sectors within the government attempted to contest the course of Lula’s second term by imposing the economic agenda that had been defeated in the polls, with budget cuts, labor and social security reforms, changes in foreign policy, thus ignoring that the project contest that had been waged in the presidential run-off elections were won by the democratic and popular forces.

The budgetary cuts advocated by those sectors run counter to the changes proposed in the Lula Government Platform. One of the names currently being rumored to assume a portfolio in the government’s economic area, Delfim Neto, ex-minister of the economy during the military dictatorship, is a strong advocate of the “zero nominal deficit” proposition, which calls for an even harsher fiscal tightening, with a reduction in investments in social and infra-structure policies.

To these sectors, social security is no social policy. The market has come to see it as a financial asset – a rich source of money, the financial system’s basic staple, always making a living by managing resources (its own or others’). A modification in Social Security rules that would make it more difficult for people to access benefits, as defended by the business community, could, in theory, push workers toward private retirement plans.

The rhetoric of the necessary labor reform is nothing but a pretext for adopting flexible labor legislation, whose outcome would only be worse working conditions and lower wages for workers.

As for the foreign policy, the conservative opposition advocates a return to an automatic alignment with the United States and the resumption of FTAA negotiations. During the first term of the Lula administration, Brazil prioritized relations with the countries of South America and diversified political and commercial relations with China, Russia, India, South Africa and the Arab countries as a means to overcoming dependence on the US. The success of such policy annoys the elite and the corporate media.

The existence of forces within the current administration fighting a fierce battle to control the economic agenda is known by all. On one side, the so-called developmentalists, who defend policies conducive to accelerated growth, and fiscal rigor and control over inflation, while generating jobs and upholding social policies. In this field are the minister of finance, Guido Mantega, and civil house minister, Dilma Rousseff.

In the other camp are those who defend the economic orthodoxy of former finance minister Antonio Palocci and the president of the central bank, Henrique Meirelles. Over the last four years Brazil adopted a high-interest rate policy and primary surpluses, which, notwithstanding, resulted in mediocre growth, which was below the world average.

To sociologist Emir Sader, there are at least two diagnoses regarding the “gridlocks” that hinder Brazil’s development: “According to the gridlocks we come to define, we will have two totally distinct countries, two totally different second terms”.

Sader reckons that the Fernando Henrique Cardoso administration sought to unlock the economy by selling public assets at undervalued prices in the privatization process; by facilitating the free circulation of capitals; by transferring capitals from the productive sector to the speculative, lured by high-yielding interest rates; and by passing labor legislation conducive to precarious working conditions -euphemistically called “informalization” and “flexibilization” of labor relations- which rather than increasing labor contracts resulted in a situation in which a majority of Brazilians have no working contracts and were expropriated of their basic rights, while elevating unemployment rather than diminishing it. “FHC considered that the State should step aside in order to give more room to the market -in education and health. Thus, in the absence of state control and regulatory capacity, the population’s social rights worsened.”

According to the sociologist, “Brazil is much more gridlocked than before. Obstacles to large capitals have been unlocked. Economic growth and social rights have been gridlocked. The State’s capability of fomenting development and redistributing wealth have been gridlocked, and thus of carrying out social demands. The legacy inherited by the Lula administration was that of a country gridlocked by the hegemony of financial capital, by a spreading of precarious working conditions, by the dismantling of the State, by the deterioration of social rights and the level of employment”.

Sader alerts that “Lula’s second term might favor even more the free circulation of capitals, allowing banks to continue gaining more than ever, that capitals be channeled to speculation and not to production, that workers have increasingly fewer jobs and fewer rights. Or it might transform the State into an instrument of economic and social development, redistributing income and raising employment levels, fostering cultural diversity and the democratization of the means of communication”.

Political alliances

The first maneuvers made by the PT and the government seek to reaffirm the programmatic commitments made during the electoral process.

On the one hand, the Party approved a resolution in which it sets as important challenges for the next period the sustainable growth of the economy, guaranteeing social inclusion, employment, income distribution and the expansion of social policies, particularly with regard to education.

The party document also sets the need for the country’s democratization, which presupposes, firstly, “a political-institutional reform that should guarantee and broaden popular sovereignty, give transparency to the institutions and ensure broader participation of the people in the country’s political life”.

Over the upcoming months it is expected that the debate concerning a potential political reform be introduced on the political agenda, one that may be capable of introducing profound changes in the Brazilian electoral and partisan systems. At the core of the discussion three points stand out: the public funding of campaigns, party lists and the upholding of proportional vote.

The resolution also advocates “the importance of democratizing social communication”. In a country like Brazil, where a handful of groups dominate the social means of communication, combating property concentration is crucial to the democratization of communication in Brazil. But this process goes beyond breaking the oligopoly of the elites over the media. It must be premised on the right to communication, which is not only the right of access but also to the production and mediation of social discourses.

The 1988 Constitution establishes the complementarity of the private and state-owned public systems of communication. The public system, however, is practically non existent. For communication to happen free from commercial or political interests, it is essential to balance the proportions between these systems and to ensure a share of the authorizations to be allotted to civil society organizations while simultaneously guaranteeing financing mechanisms.

As highlighted by Venício Lima, a researcher for the University of São Paulo’s NEMP – a think tank on media and politics- , “the creation of a media public system, in addition to being a constitutional imperative, would advance communication’s plurality and diversity -which in other words means contributing to perfecting our democracy”.

Lastly, the Workers’ Party resolution defends “upholding and increasing investments in social policies, in particular the universalization of access to and improvement of the quality of education, the production and appropriation of scientific and technological breakthroughs, as well as the Brazilian cultural production, which must be viewed as instruments of great opportunity toward the education of the new generations and the overcoming of inequalities”.

Within the ambit of the government, President Lula, on the other hand, is talking with the political parties and presenting an agenda containing the priorities for the next term, based on which he intends to build a broad coalition government.

The agenda proposed ranges from the political and tax reforms to questions related to economic growth, income distribution and the strengthening of the federative covenant, plus the creation of a Political Council formed by the coalition parties and designed to keep track of the government’s actions.

In practice, during the first term there was an attempt to set up a coalition government, though there was no permanent body under which the political parties could gather.

The first real test for this coalition proposed by the Lula administration will be the election in the upcoming days of the speakers of both houses of congress, and later on in the 2008 and 2010 elections.

A preview of what these contests will be like did not work very well. Early in December the government was defeated in a secret vote which chose the new minister for the Union’s Auditing Court (TCU).

Aroldo Cedraz, of the Liberal Front Party (PFL), won the race with 172 votes against 148 of Workers’ Party representative for Minas Gerais State Paulo Delgado. The opposition won in spite of its split-up and the government lost even unified. Besides Cedraz, the opposition launched the candidacies of Gonzaga Mota, of the Brazilian Social Democratic Party (PSDB), who got 50 votes, and of Ademir Camilo, of the Democratic Labour Party (PDT), who obtained 20 votes.

As the PT sees it, it is necessary to set up a leftist nucleus inside the coalition government. Such nucleus would be composed of the center-left parties –such as the Communist Party of Brazil (PCdoB)– which supported President Lula from the beginning, and which would also include the Brazilian Socialist Party (PSB) The Workers’ Party National Board Resolution also states that “the PT will propose to the Brazilian Socialist Party and to the Communist Party of Brazil a process of discussions that enables the establishment of a more coordinated action of the leftist forces that support the government.”

The document “Conjuncture, Tactic and Alliance Politics” approved by the Workers’ Party XIII National Meeting already expressed the guidelines for a governability different from that which was implemented during Lula’s first term. According to the text released in April this year, “in our second presidential term, we will need a governability of a new kind, based on the adequate combination of parliamentary strength, presence in state and municipal governments, support and organized mobilization of society, stronger action from the PT and the remaining leftist parties, engagement of the democratic intellectuality, increased political initiative of our administration and a deepening of our international alliances”.

New composition

The PCdoB has already hinted at its intention of assenting to the coalition proposed by the government. The party’s national president, Renato Rabelo, believes that “a greater cohesion and coordinated action by the leftist parties inside the government will agglutinate strengths to put in practice the ideas formulated in the government platform presented to society in the electoral process that reelected President Lula”.

As for the PSB, a party resolution approved in late November states that the party’s position in the two rounds of the presidential election ensures “its unique position in the spectrum of the Brazilian left, acquiring objective conditions to participate in a decisive way in the future second term of President Lula, defending his theses, his platform and the accentuation of the popular and democratic character of our government”.

President Lula too has secured the adhesion of the Party of the Brazilian Democratic Movement (PMDB). Having allied with Geraldo Alckmin (PSDB) in the election, PMDB president Michel Temer declared full support to the government. According to the PMDB leader, the party is united around the new coalition. This fact is causing some perplexity since obtaining the support of the PMDB to the government is something that has been attempted by every president who took over since the country’s redemocratization, yet never really materialized. Today only the group led by the president of the senate, Renan Calheiros, and ex-president of the Republic José Sarney support the government.

The PMDB is still highly fractured in spite the rhetoric of unity. The party nurtures with the new composition the possibility of gaining more space in the government.

The Workers’ Party, in the National Board’s resolution, guarantees that it will share responsibilities with all the forces that undertake the platform of changes chosen by the population in the last elections. It defends, however, that the “coalition government is not a condominium based on the physiological distribution of posts. It is rather a commitment to a program. The solidity of such Government depends essentially on its programmatic cohesion, on the support of the Congress it comes to obtain and on the capacity to provoke strong and mobilized support from society”.

The Democratic Labour Party’s executive board, reinforced by the presence of the party’s representatives in congress and the presidents of regional boards, approved on December 13 the participation of the party in President Lula’s coalition government. The decision will now be submitted to the party’s national board, which is scheduled to meet on January 12 in Brasília.

The PDT’s governor-elect of Maranhão, Jackson Lago, believes the party will support the Lula government starting in 2007. In the second-round run-off election to the governorship of Maranhão, Lago received the support of the Workers’ Party state board, while his adversary, Senator Roseana Sarney, received the support of Lula for her candidacy.

In relation to the PDT members opposing an alliance with the government, such as Senators Jefferson Peres (AM), Osmar Dias (PR) and Cristovam Buarque (DF), the party’s national president, federal deputy Carlos Lupi (RJ), stated that there is room to discuss their position but said he believes the position adopted by the majority will be followed by the minority. It is worth highlighting that Buarque, who was defeated in this year’s presidential elections, is originally from the Workers’ Party and declared his preference for the PSDB presidential candidate, Geraldo Alckmin, in the second round of the polls.

The Brazilian Labor Party is the only party whose minister, Walfrido Mares Guia, holding the tourism office, has already been confirmed in the new Lula cabinet. The president is betting, however, that the president of the PTB, former deputy Roberto Jefferson, will leave the party so that his party peers may join the coalition.

Jefferson, a former ally of Lula’s who, when accused of getting kickbacks in a corruption scheme in the post office, denounced that congressmen were receiving money to stay in the government base. Without any evidence, Jefferson was impeached.

Another party that has already manifested its intention of joining the coalition is the Green Party (PV).

Lula and the PT

For this new mandate, PT leaders expect relations with the government to change. Soon after the elections Lula met with Workers’ Party leaders and attended a meeting of the party’s National Board held in late November.

Members of the party’s National Board Political Committee met with Lula on November 16. This was the third formal meeting involving the Workers’ Party board and the president, since early 2003, when Lula took over. The first meeting occurred in December, and the second on the eve of the Convention that launched Lula’s reelection campaign.

On the agenda, an exchange of opinions on several matters, among which, Lula’s second term challenges, party/government relations, Congress/government relations, the need for institutional relations with the political parties, the importance of the political council composed of the parties that supported Lula’s reelection, the need to scale up the relation with social movements, the road map for the economic policy, as well as health, education and communication policies.

According to the PT’s national president, Marco Aurélio Garcia, the discussions with Lula focused on the broad guidelines for the second mandate, which also includes prioritizing the political reform.

According to the PT’s International Relations Secretary, who is also a member of the National Board Political Committee, meeting participants “believe that the party/government relation, in the second term, must be profoundly different from what occurred in the beginning of the present term. For one, a clear autonomy of the two parties, with no kind of “transmission belt”. For another, a much closer relation with regard to at least two points: organizing society to stand up for the program approved in the polls and debating the most strategic issues with the government”.

Insofar as President Lula’s actions point to a “coalition government”, it becomes more important for the PT to combine the natural support for the government with maintaining the party’s autonomy and critical capacity regarding inevitable programmatic contention.

Lula’s presence at the PT’s National Board meeting is indicative of new scenarios. Unlike the first term, when the president kept at a distance from the party’s decisions, Lula stated that he intends, now, to participate more often in talks and discussions.

“The fact that I am the president does not prevent me from attending meetings of the PT’s National Board or with the Executive Board. We must transform this political relation into an activity of our daily life. A respectful, institutional and brotherly relation”. The president also criticized those who advise him to stay away from the party. “How can I leave the PT if the PT does not leave me?” he asked

Lula spoke too of the question of the party’s participation in the government. There’s no such discussion of more PT or less PT. We cannot accept the divergences [others] try to put in our mouths”, he said.

The election over, the media embarked on the “third round”, trying by all means to downplay the PT’s victory and the role the party had in Lula’s reelection, seeking with that to reduce to the utmost the influence and presence of the Workers’ Party in the second mandate. The word despetização (de-petistization) was largely used as a way to denounce the presence of petistas in the government.

The National Board resolution was critical of the press’s veiled intent. The text approved at the meeting states that it is necessary“to denounce and defeat the attempt, sponsored by sectors of the political opposition and the economic right, circulating in a part of the media, to confiscate the people’s victory in October. There are just a few of them, yet they want to impose on the elected government the ‘political agenda’ that was defeated in the elections, as well as having a saying on the composition of the government. They insidiously raise the thesis of the “de-petistization”of the government, blaming the party for an alleged “apparatus-building” inside the State during the first term, a thesis that finds no support in reality”.

To Marco Aurélio Garcia, the Workers’ Party national president, “the party has members [qualified] to occupy any function in the government. Regardless of that, the party has no interest whatsoever in discussing its size in the next term”.

Garcia stated that the government will have its own mechanisms to form the coalition, and the PT will keep in contact with these bodies to make suggestions and proposals. “They want to convey the idea that we want to form apparatuses, to sell lots, but that’s not true. We are not the least concerned with this affair.”

III Workers’ Party Congress

The PT’s National Board called the party’s III National Congress for July 6-8, 2007, which will address the Construction of the PT as a political instrument of the working class and the updating of the Democratic, Popular and Socialist Project for Brazil.

According to the board, the different phases of the III Congress will cast a look on the party’s history “of partisan construction, social struggles, international solidarity and presence in legislative and executive institutions. It will cast a look at, especially, the experience of President Lula’s first term”.

The III Congress’s debates aim at preparing the party to face the challenges of the present and the future, among which we highlight the responsibility of governing a country for another term-of-office and preparing the ground for a long cycle of sustained development.

To accomplish such goals, the III Congress debates will involve the whole of the petistas, in addition to dialoguing with allied parties, social movements, the critical intellectuality and all those who struggle to strengthen democracy in Brazil, with a view to the country’s sovereign embedding in the world and to make Brazil a fairer nation.