THE BRAZILIAN WORKERS' PARTY: FROM LOCAL PRACTICES TO NATIONAL POWER

THE BRAZILIAN WORKERS’ PARTY: FROM LOCALPRACTICES TO NATIONAL POWER

Gianpaolo Baiocchi and Sofia Checa

Brazil’s Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT), well into its second term in national office, is today heavilycriticized for its conservative economic policies when only a few years ago it was celebrated for re-invigoratingthe country’s democracy and giving voice to its poor majority. In this essay, we discuss the role of participationin the party’s politics since its inception, with a focus on the national administration. We argue that whatis distinctive about the national administration is not so much the real or perceived transition of the PT tothe ideological center or its economic policies per se, but the abandonment of one of the hallmarks of the PTin power: its creative forms of empowered popular participation. Even if these practices were translated toglobal forums, they were not translated to the national governance and this has locked the party intoincreasing conflict with, and isolation from, its base of support among social movements.

It is now common to speak of a “Pink Tide” in Latin America. FromUruguay to Mexico, the Left has become an electoral force, with former oppo-nents or victims of authoritarian regimes taking national office or nearly doingso throughout the region. This cohort is extremely varied. From the creativeexperimentalism of Tabaré Vasquez and the Frente Amplio in Uruguay to theoversize persona of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, it is difficult to characterize thepolitical parties or social movements behind them one way. Besides a commoncommitment to national sovereignty and a sense of a search for an alternative tounfettered markets and the Washington Consensus, little unites these politicalforces. Central to any story about this reinvigorated Left is the puzzle surround-ing Lula and the Workers’ Party in Brazil. In power since 2003, the partymanaged reelection in 2006 despite a series of policies that brought it in conflictwith its social movement base of support and corruption scandals that alienatedmiddle-class voters. The party is now often dismissed by commentators on theLeft as having betrayed its socialist roots, although its staunch base of supportnow is among the poor.

It is an accepted fact that Lula’s national victory in Brazil’s presidentialelections of October of 2002 marked a turning point for Brazilian democracy.The election of a militant labor leader and political prisoner of humble originswas in many ways unprecedented and was met with great expectation, especiallyfrom the country’s poor and working-class majority who helped propel one of

WorkingUSA: The Journal of Labor and Society · 1089-7011 · Volume 10 · December 2007 · pp. 411–430© 2007 The Author(s)

Journal compilation © 2007 Immanuel Ness and Blackwell Publishing Inc.

their own to power. For Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT) activists this marked theend of a long quest for national power that had eluded them in 1989, 1994, and1998, and included years of grassroots organizing and two decades of managinglocal administrations of all sizes. In an atmosphere of festivity that dominatedBrasília in early 2003, Lula marked the beginning of his administration with aseries of symbolic acts. One was to institute the Council for Economic and SocialDevelopment, thereby enshrining popular voice in the national administration.Shortly after, Lula received a genuine hero’s welcome at the World SocialForum (WSF) in January of 2003, talking before thousands of adoring activistsfrom the Global North and South.

When Lula spoke again at the next Forum in 2005, the reception could nothave been more different. PT activists had to pack the stadium to preventhecklers and Lula was constantly interrupted by the audience. The Forum alsocounted with recent and well-known dissidents who had abandoned the party inthe previous two years, including some of its founders. A “Letter to Petistas” wascirculated with hundreds of signatures of prominent activists who remainedwithin the party, indicting the administration:

We have Lula as the repository of home of the Brazilian people. We had andhave choices to make. We are against the choices in the political economythat imply the continuity, sometimes even more orthodox, with the FernandoHenrique Cardoso government. These policies concentrate income and wealth,maintain the submission of the country to big capital and its internationalinstitutions, impedes priority for social investment, demobilizes forces for socialchange, and doesn’t create the conditions for broad sectors of society thenecessity of political and ideological struggle.1

A number of political crises had shaken the party and the administration inthe previous months, including one leading to the expulsion of four parliamen-tarians in 2003, a series of national strikes by civil servants, and humiliatingdefeats in the municipal elections in November of 2004 in some of its mostimportant cities. Six months after the Forum, in June of 2005, corruptionallegations began to surface around a vote-buying scheme that seemed to involvethe highest echelons of the party. After months of parliamentary inquiry, andeven talk of impeachment, the crisis dissipated, although not without its lossesfor the party: four parliamentarians were expelled from Congress and the headof the civil house and a few members of the party (including its treasurer andpresident) lost their posts. Most importantly, the party lost its image amongmany Brazilians of all classes and all ideological orientations as an ethical partyand a party of outsiders. For many people in Brazil who had believed in the PT,the common sentiment, echoed in newspaper editorials, was that the “dream wasover.”2

At stake, for critics of the administration, as described above, are the gov-ernment’s economic policies. In the name of allaying fears of “investor confi-dence,” for example, the administration has chosen to exceed the target primarybudget surpluses set forth by the IMF on the bailout loan the previous admin-

412 WORKINGUSA: THE JOURNAL OF LABOR AND SOCIETY

istration accepted, severely diminishing the funds available for social investment.The government’s overhaul of an outdated pension system as a means to balancethe budget was viewed with suspicion by some of the Left, as was its attempt topass in Congress a lower figure than that defended by center and center-rightparties for a revised minimum wage. These economic policies have done little toameliorate social problems, and have severely limited overall social spending onhealth, education and housing, thus stalling the hopes for “ending hunger” andother campaign promises.

In an administration full of symbolic moments, one instance that was seizedupon by critics was on May Day of 2003, at the site of the strikes that propelledLula to the national stage, when the president said, “workers need to give a littlebit in the name of society.”3 Could it be that Lula has had an about-face? Avirtual cottage industry of critics from the Left in Brazil and abroad certainlythinks so, criticizing his government for selling out, betraying the workingclasses, and bending to neoliberalism, among other things. Some of the accusa-tions lay the blame on Lula himself or high-ranking PT members for having“sold out” once in office. Some point to an alleged rightward turn in the PT overthe last ten years, while others point to the impossibility of progressive actionwithin the institutions of capitalist democracy, particularly in the current“global” moment.4

The crux of the matter may lie somewhere in between. Indeed there arecompromises inherent in national power; there is learning involved in nationalgovernance; and it is also true that the PT’s platforms have, in recent years,steadily moved away from mentions of socialism. However, if rather than com-paring the national administration to the militant rhetoric of Lula or the PT’sfounders in 1979 we consider the experiences and practices of the PT in execu-tive power at different administrative levels in recent years, a different contrastemerges. What is distinctive about the national administration is not so mucheconomic pragmatism, but the abandonment of one of the hallmarks of the PTin power: its creative forms of empowered popular participation. It is not somuch the real or perceived transition of the PT to the ideological center, butrather its transition away from the “participatory road”5 (a model that combinesbroad-based participation, redistribution, and good governance) that is the bigdifference. The centerpiece of this participatory strategy that the PT hasemployed successfully at the local level are forms of progressive governanceanchored in broad and empowered participation that have had the effect of bothoffering electoral legitimacy and increasing governmental effectiveness, whileempowering the disadvantaged to have a voice in state decision making.

In other words, what is most distinctive about Lula’s administration is notits set of economic policies per se, but its rupture with the principle of direct,popular input into decision making, which would have implied democraticdiscussion in such matters as the composition of the federal budget or nationaleconomic priorities. In this essay, we thus try to shift the discussion away fromthe content of policies under Lula to a discussion of the politics of their creation.The administration has been forced to seek broad parliamentary alliances on the

413BAIOCCHI AND CHECA: THE BRAZILIAN WORKERS’ PARTY

one hand, while on the other, has had increasingly conflictive relationships withorganized sectors in its base of support, the very social movements that playedsuch an important role in bringing the PT to national power in the first place.We place these events in the context of globalization, and discuss the way thatthis practice of participatory democracy emerges locally in Brazil, is translated tomany sites in the 1990s, but is not translated to national practices of the party,even if the translation to global settings via the WSF is successful. After brieflydiscussing the evolution of the participatory road during the 1990s, we addressattempts at participation in the national administration as well as the WSF.

Globalization, Politics and the Translation of Progressive Practices

Debates about “globalization” became a centerpiece of many a discussions inthe last quarter of the twentieth century in the field of sociology and economics,among others.6 Among the most significant developments of the twentiethcentury has been the “concentration of power in transnational and globalinstitutions” (Teivainen 2002, 621). While the 1980s were referred to as a “lostdecade” for parts of the developing world, the 1990s presented a more ambigu-ous picture characterized by patterns of economic globalization, the deregula-tion and liberalization of national economies, the decentralization of nationalstates, and tentative steps toward democratic consolidation. Some analystscontend that the transition toward democracy that many Latin American coun-tries were going through in the 1980s was accompanied by a “successful ideo-logical operation . . . that linked the neoliberal economic policies then spreadingacross the continent with the needs of democratic governance” (Munck 2003,496–7). This transition though, and more specifically, the decentralization thataccompanied this transition, also opened up institutional spaces for local actorsto carry out innovative reforms (Baiocchi and Checa 2005).

The “decentralization of government” has been the slogan of policy makersthroughout much of the developing world since the 1980s as well as interna-tional financial institutions and donors more recently,7 who have argued thatdecentralization would make governance less bureaucratic, more responsive, andmore efficient. Within the literature though, understanding of the effects ofdecentralization is much more contested. While some see it as proof of thepositive impacts of globalization as bloated and corrupt national-level bureau-cracies are dismantled presumably in favor of more responsive local units, forothers it implies the erosion of the regulatory capacity of states to assure theminimum conditions for democracy (ibid.).

The current period of globalization has, no doubt, introduced a number ofchanges to the nature and functioning of national states, and thus to the natureof democracy itself. Some theorists see globalization as negatively affectingnational states by reducing their autonomy before transnational institutions andinternational capital. This process leads to weakening of regulatory capacities;weakening ability to monitor and control stocks and flows of capital, money,and commodities; and decreasing the ability to provide the basis for national


solidarity (Arrighi and Silver 1999; Habermas and Pensky 2001; Held 1996;Tilly 1995). Others, while not denying the weakening of national states, arguethat globalization has primarily altered the “socio-spatial scales” of the function-ing of states (Brenner 2004; Jessop 2000; Keil 1998; Weiss 1997). The state doesnot just “wither away” as it “hollows out,” rather its functions are displaced intonewer or altered lower- or upper-level state institutions. The local or regionalscale thus does not “replace” the national scale “as the primary level of political-economic coordination” but rather state institutions, while “spatially reconfig-ured,” continue to be important “mediators of political economic restructuringat all geographical scales” (Brenner 2004, 3–4).8 In this new spatial configura-tion, the local, and in particular the local urban state, emerges as an importantsite because it is more porous than national states and is situated “in the con-fluence of globalization dynamics and increased local political action based incivil society” (Keil 1998). It may be thus misleading to assume that a decline indemocracy is a foregone conclusion of current trends. Meaningful and lastingchange can occur if progressive political forces were to “locate strategic openingswithin the institutional landscapes,” through “‘counterhegemonic’ regulatoryinitiatives” (Brenner 2004, 301–02).

In this context, progressive political parties can play a distinctive role,seizing on these strategic openings at various scales of government and dif-fusing successful practices. Because these openings occur in a decentralizedfashion, progressive party structures should be flexible enough to harnessinnovations appearing at various points to diffuse them in many directions. Astrictly hierarchical and centralized political party is not going to be able toplay this role. Neither is a party that is not open to the input of civil societyand social movements. We conceive of the metaphor of translation for the roleof progressive political parties in this new global context. Translation impliesadapting novel practices of civil society to new domains, turning civil societyinnovations into policies and diffusing these across contexts and levels of gov-ernment. In the 1990s, PT administrators achieved precisely this. Throughexperimentation and openness to civil society input, they crafted a model ofparticipatory governance that managed to harness the creativity of civil societywhile continually expanding the party’s bases of support and its arenas ofconcern. This model seized upon the institutional openings created by thedecentralization of the state that occurred in the late 1980s. Local govern-ments received significantly more political and fiscal autonomy, were maderesponsible (or co-responsible) for the delivery of many services, and were nowlegally free to institutionalize channels of direct popular participation in publicaffairs, establishing legal provisos for participatory mechanisms (Baiocchi2006).

The anticipation of the abolition of the two-party system in the late 1970ssparked debates among the opposition about the formation of a new party(Guidry 2003; Keck 1986). The rise in strength of the new unionism at the sametime led to the discussion of the formation of a Workers’ Party, which eventuallycaused a split among intellectuals and exiled political leaders. The strongest


disagreement was on whether the new party should be class-oriented or more ofa democratic socialist party. While Lula and other union leaders wanted a partywhere workers could represent themselves rather than be represented by others,many intellectuals, including leftist and center-left, did not believe that theworkers had “the knowledge needed to run a party, far less govern the country.”Fernando Henrique Cardoso, famous sociologist and a former Communist (andfuture president of Brazil), among others, withdrew from the project, but manyother intellectuals either were supportive from the beginning or rethought theirpositions and were convinced to join the party (Branford and Kucinski 1995, 47;Singer 2001).

The PT, which was founded in 1980 by union leaders, has been referred toas a social movement party. Since its inception, it has had close relationships withpopular movements, unions, human rights groups, farmers’ organizations, therather progressive Catholic Church, and the like. In spite of its roots in laborunions, the PT has not maintained formal institutional relations with unions norhas it been controlled or funded by the unions (Branford and Kucinski 1995, 7).The Workers’ Party combines within itself the interests of labor with those of itsbroader social bases (Guidry 2003, 83–4). Party members were allowed to wear“double shirts,” that is, they were allowed to be part of their groups as well as thePT (Branford and Kucinski 1995, 48–9). The PT’s political base thus consists ofmany diverse social movements and community organizations, blurring the linebetween party militancy and movement militancy (Davis 1997). Roberts refersto this as the organic model of party organization. The organic model is associatedwith parties that emerge “as the political expression of organized groups in civilsociety” (e.g., the PT) wherein the distinction between party and constituentsocial organizations is blurred and the party appears more as a movementengaged in extra-institutional struggles (Roberts 1998, 75). “PT’s organic rela-tionship with mass organizations and social movements has provided a commonpolitical space that links popular and political struggles while respecting theirrelative autonomy” (ibid. 277).

When the PT came to power, the main problem that it faced was negotiatingthe political demands of the party’s base in a way that did not jeopardize theparty’s ability to govern. One of the recurring problems of many administra-tions, particularly where the local movements and public sector unions compris-ing the PT’s base were strong, centered around the inability of administrationsto distance themselves from demands that could not possibly be met givencurrent finances. Early attempts at governance in the 1980s and in the early1990s thus often ended in a series of endemic problems. The problems includesplits between party factions; conflicts with organized bases of support; theinability to govern with a minority in the local legislative; and a distrust fromsegments of the population who only experienced the resulting failures of gov-ernance, such as weeklong bus strikes. Some administrators, such as in the cityof Santos or in Porto Alegre, nonetheless successfully implemented participatoryprograms as a strategy for negotiation of demands and legitimating of platformswith the population at large in ways that helped avert some of the conflicts. In


best-case scenarios, participation provided solutions to some of these dilemmasof “radicals in power” (Baiocchi 2003). Of course, the very idea of participationin government came from Brazilian civil society itself. Since the 1980s, urbansocial movements, which had actively participated in the pro-democracy move-ment, made demands for more accountable forms of city governance, calling fordecentralization and citizen participation in the running of city affairs as a basicright of citizenship (Moura 1989).

Successful programs like Participatory Budgeting in Porto Alegre drewbroad sectors beyond organized social movements as empowered decisionmakers into matters of governance, in this case specifically deciding on newforms of local investment. While the decentralization of government has notdone much to reduce overall regional inequalities, it has nonetheless createdinstitutional spaces for local actors to carry out innovative reforms in gover-nance. It created settings where claimants themselves could be part of thenegotiation of demands; in terms of governance, this generated legitimacy forstrategies of governance, if not improving governance directly.9 The quality ofthis form of radical democracy, which turns both social movement participantsas well as unorganized citizens into discussants, depends on the autonomy ofthese participatory spaces from party control. The degree of autonomy isevident in Participatory Budget meetings where PT members do not participateas “party members” but rather as independent citizens or as members of civilsociety organizations with rules strictly prohibiting the meetings from beingturned into partisan spaces (Baiocchi 2004, 211). By bringing conflict to beresolved into participatory settings, administrators have found ways to generateconsensus around redistributive platforms and helped prevent conflict againstthe administration. Participatory Budgeting in time became a widely appliedform of the “PT way of governing.”

If what drew attention to the PT in the 1980s was its novelty as an internallydemocratic leftist party that did not seek to dominate social movements, whatcaught attention in the 1990s was its model of local governance.10 By the late1990s, the PT had governed over 200 municipalities of all sizes. Often, thesewere successful attempts at governing with the real input from civil society,transforming the creativity of the popular voices into a real, legitimate mandate.While among the cases documented by scholars there are failures, in many casesthere is a transformation of local politics, with the inclusion of many previouslyexcluded voices into the running of government. The process of diffusion ofthese models was extremely decentralized, with significant transformationsalong the way. However, the idea of participatory governance was enshrined inthe “Program for a Democratic Revolution” in the 1999 party congress.

The Program lays out the foundations for an eventual PT national admin-istration. The “Democratic Revolution” under a PT presidency would bethe beginning of a long transformation of deepening of economic andsocial democracy, extending human rights and citizenship to the country’smajority, reforming institutions of representation, and increasing democraticand direct control over the state. While the party does not want to be a perpetual


opposition party, it understands that “it is not enough to arrive at the govern-ment to change the society. It is necessary also to change the society to arrive atthe government.” The Democratic Revolution is viewed as a long process, but notone that is inevitable. It involves the reorganization of society, politics, and theeconomy, with a new hierarchy of values based on equality, freedom, and soli-darity. Education, health, literacy, welfare, and economic well-being are allcentral to the democratic thesis.11

The program reiterates PT’s unique strategy of not only participating inmunicipal and state governments and the parliament but also combining thatwith different social struggles using strategies as wide as land occupations,strikes, and other mobilizations. It also stresses the necessity of extending partyaffiliations, making the integration of new activists into the party easier, as wellas continuing dialogue with the academics, artists, intellectuals, professionals,and social movements. A centerpiece of the program is extending the experienceof local-level administrations to the national government. The program of theDemocratic Revolution states that

The PT has been a pioneer in this political experimentalism that permitscombining representative with direct democracy. The Participatory Budgets,diffused at the local level, are now being implemented at the state level and mustbe part of a future national project. The participation of workers, users, andrepresentatives of society will allow the democratization of public policies, ofpublic enterprises, and of private activities essential to the population. [. . .] Ademocratic state—controlled by society—will be called to perform a decisiverole in the new political economy.12

It is not surprising, then, that the PT’s victory at the national level raisedexpectations about popular participation in government. In addition, while therewere serious calls and discussions around a Federal Participatory Budget in themonths leading to Lula’s election, by August of 2002, the authors of the gov-ernment plan announced that the PT would institute no such thing upon avictory, citing practical difficulties. The principle of Participatory Budgetingwould be translated, according to Palocci, at the Federal level as “forums fordebate.”13 Nonetheless, Federal Participatory Budgeting remained on theninety-page plan of government released by the PT, although it was confined toone sentence recommending its adoption.

The Limits of Participation within the National Administration

Will the exciting experience of Porto Alegre’s “participatory budget” in Brazilnow be scaled up to the national level or does “globalization” block thisoption?” (Munck 2003, 495)

The PT’s struggle to national power was a long and arduous one. In mid-2002 during Lula’s fourth presidential election campaign, the PT’s mass base


was strong enough to give Lula a lead in opinion polls. During the campaign theBrazilian and international financiers’ concerns about the PT’s radical image wasevident in “the hostility and hysteria of the international capital markets”(Munck 2003, 506) with its risk rating shooting up with Lula’s first gains in thepolls in 2002.14 Several financial institutions, for example, refused to purchasegovernment securities maturing after December 2002—the last day of Cardoso’spresidency. The Brazilian economy, according to Saad-Filho, “tottered on thebrink of collapse” in mid-2002 (Morais and Saad-Filho, 2005, 8).

The new administration needed to establish “‘credibility’ with domestic andinternational finance” in order to forestall further turbulence. In June 2002, Lulapublished a “Letter to the Brazilian People” stating that “his government wouldrespect contracts (i.e., service the domestic and foreign debts on schedule) andenforce the economic program agreed with the IMF.” The new IMF agreementsigned in September 2002 would make available 80 percent of the loan offeredonly when the “policies [of the new administration] were approved by the Fund”(ibid.). Brazil, today, continues to make its debt payments, allaying investorconfidence; foreign investment has continued apace after a relative decline in thefirst months of the administration; there has not been a return to inflation; andthe real has held steady against the dollar.

The concessions that the PT had to make in order to come into powernationally, along with the fact that the PT won only 91 out of 513 deputies in theNational Congress and 10 out of 54 seats in the Federal senate (Munck 2003,506) imposed limits on the new administration. In an effort to make allianceswith centrist and rightist parties, the PT found itself compromising on policyand legislation “yielding a national administration that is not only difficult tocomprehend as a PT administration, but that also lacked coherence” (ibid.).Ministry posts were doled out to radicals from with the PT on the one hand, andconservatives from outside the PT on the other hand.

Participatory Efforts

Nonetheless, the national PT administration has not been devoid ofattempts to establish participatory channels. Some well-publicized effortsinclude formation of the Council of Economic and Social Development (CDES)and the Multiyear Plan. The PT national budget would draw on advice fromveteran local PT administrators in prominent positions in the administrationwho had participatory experience. These and others, however, have been marredby administrative inconsistency, lack of clarity about the role of popular input,and the relegation of ultimate decision making to the administration itself.

The CDES was set up to create a state-civil society dialogue to foster a “newsocial contract.”15 Roughly modeled on similar national councils in social-democratic countries, the CDES includes representatives from government,business, trade unions, and civil society, as well as twelve ministers. Headed inits first year by Participatory Budget architect Tarso Genro, the CDES washeralded as an “important instrument” for making debate surrounding policy


questions more democratic (Gazeta Mercantil 2003a). Unlike instruments likethe Participatory Budget, however, the CDES is not vested with decision-making power and participation in it is limited to a few civil society represen-tatives. It has been criticized for allowing little room for participant-initiatedagenda items (ibid.). In addition to allowing the administration to articulate acoalition to support its structural reforms, the CDES has accomplished little.For example, after a series of meetings in 2003 on macroeconomic policy,the council proposed a number of economic steps, including reducing interestrates and increasing social spending, most of which were not taken up (GazetaMercantil 2003a; Gazeta Mercantil 2003b).

Similarly, the PPA—the Plano Plurianual, or Multiyear Plan—held for somethe prospects of creating a participatory process on national investment prior-ities. A process of consultation with civil society took place in all twenty-sevenstates, and culminated in a proposed PPA in August of 2003. The PPA wasextensively modified by both the executive and by Congress, and resulted in afinal document that ultimately privileged certain exporting industries, such asmining and agro-industry, and included dam construction projects that wereheavily criticized by civil society watchers. The executive branch in fact submit-ted a 2006 budget to Congress unrelated to even the modified PPA. Like theCDES, the PPA process invoked the language of participation, but had anunclear mandate as far as linking that participation to decision making. Like theCDES, it became a process that included consultation but mystified “technicaldecisions” such as interest rates or budgetary priorities as the exclusive realm ofgovernment technocrats.

As critics of the PT administration have pointed out, the policies carried outby this government are hardly distinguishable from those of previous adminis-trations and were at odds with its goals of social justice and redistribution. ThePT’s term in office has been characterized by limited government investment insocial spending on health, education, and housing with little, if any, improve-ment in real wages and employment rates. Many PT activists are growingincreasingly disappointed with the policies of the Lula administration. It doesnot therefore come as a surprise that the administration has found itself at oddswith its social movements’ base.

Increasing Conflicts with its Base of Support

Since its inception, the PT has had close relationships with a wide range ofsocial movements, and has been described as “a political expression of popularand grassroots objectives without attempting to control or co-opt its own basisof support” (Guidry 2003, 103). Brazil’s largest social movement, the MST(Movimento Sem Terra, or Landless Movement) and its main labor federation,the CUT, have traditionally been closely linked with the party, even if formallyautonomous. There has usually been a large overlap in membership betweenthem and the PT, and notable activists associated with these movements haverisen to political prominence within the party, sometimes winning seats in state


or federal legislative bodies. In addition, perhaps most importantly, the partyhas, until recent years, always defended the claims of these movements ininstitutional settings. In Congress throughout the 1990s the PT was the partyassociated with land-reform proposals or fighting for a higher minimum wage.

The shift in direction occasioned by the national victory in 2002 severelystrained these relationships. For the CUT, one of the first issues was thecontroversial pension-reform proposed by the Lula administration. As a way ofreducing social spending, the administration reduced pension benefits fromseveral categories of civil servants, which occasioned large protests in Brasilia inmid-2003. Subsequently, conflicts in Congress over a minimum-wage readjust-ment led to the curious situation in which the PT government defended a lowerreadjustment than the one wanted by right-wing parties. João Pedro Stédile, aleader of the MST, around the same time, while disappointed with the progressof agrarian reform stated that

Only the strength of millions of mobilised, politically aware Brazilians will helpthe government to face those [powerful] interests and change the currenteconomic model. We are hopeful.16

The MST pursued a strategy of increased mobilization and protest in hopesof a government response. With the administration’s failure to implementpromised reforms, the MST stepped up the pressure, launching a wave of landinvasions and occupations of government offices. In early 2004, the MST gaveLula another six months to implement his campaign promise of land reform andin 2005 organized the National March for Land Reform. All this eventually ledto the introduction of the National Plan of Land Reform in May 2005, whichamong other things, promised a total of 400,000 landless families settled by theend of 2006. At the time of this writing, the administration claims it has settleda total of 250,000 families, a figure that is vigorously contested by MST leaders,who claim the actual figure is closer to half that number. While the settlementis still several times the number of families settled by the previous administra-tion, the plan does little to change significantly the pattern of land concentrationin Brazil, and has fallen short of campaign promises.

The relationship with social movements in general, and with the MST andlabor unions in particular, has followed a particular trajectory. Early on, move-ments were disappointed but hopeful that mobilization would yield positiveresponses from the government. João Machado, a member of the Socialist Democ-racy, a leftist tendency within the PT, commented that by the end of the firstyear, the Lula administration had forced social movements to change practices.They had step up contention and were actively “pressuring the government andopposing its choices” (Machado 2003). The formation of the Coordination ofSocial Movements (CMS) by the MST, CUT, and other bodies was, accordingto Machado, a response to this new challenge faced by movements and the beliefthat “a broad and unified popular mobilization alone can guarantee the con-quests of the toiling classes.”


Lula’s second and third years in office saw this increased contention. On thepart of movements, this included strikes and marches in Brasilia, but without theCUT or the MST breaking ties with the PT (Fuentes 2005; Machado 2005).Even at the biggest march ever of the MST organized to push for agrarianreform in 2005, MST leader Stedile made clear that “[w]e know that in order toachieve agrarian reform, it is not a question of political will or the personalcommitment of the president. . . . [T]he march is not against the Brazilian gov-ernment, but for agrarian reform and a change in economic policy” (as quoted inFuentes 2005). Dissension within the PT also grew, leading to a few expulsionsand the departure of several prominent petistas, who went on to form a break-away party, the PSOL (Partido Socialismo e Liberdade or Party of Socialism andLiberty).

The Corruption Scandal and the PT’s New Face

Perhaps the most decisive events of Lula’s first term were the ones leadingto the corruption scandals beginning in mid-2005. Although evidence of themost severe charges of vote-buying was not substantiated by the parliamentarycommission, many important PT leaders were involved in improprieties, includ-ing improper campaign financing and illicit accounting procedures with partyfunds. The country stopped for weeks as the scandal unfolded on TV andpolitician after politician was implicated. Alliance members abandoned the PTas it looked like, for the first time since the election, Lula would not be reelectedif not outright impeached before then. For many Brazilians, the image of theparty was forever damaged. For almost two decades, the party had run andgoverned on platforms of clean government, participation, and redistribution,and for many middle-class Brazilians “clean government” had made the wholepackage acceptable. The PT in Congress had been known as an ethical forcewith PT parliamentarians having played a decisive role in the impeachment ofPresident Collor in 1992.

The conservative media in Brazil seized on the accusations, and thebarrage temporarily destabilized the party. Perhaps surprisingly, some socialmovements reacted in defense of the President, although with the understand-ing that the party in a more precarious electoral situation would more likelyheed movement claims for a change in course for the administration. Activistswithin the party also saw an opportunity to change the course of events. In2005, the party turned out over 300,000 members to vote in internal directelections, and those elections shifted internal politics to the Left. The “Social-ist Refoundation” platform did not carry the day, but one of its authors,former Porto Alegre Mayor and leader of the largest Trotskyist tendency withthe PT, Socialist Democracy, became its secretary-general. The strong partici-pation of members and the renewed visibility of some party leaders close tosocial movements raised expectations that the national administration, at leastfor the remaining of its first term, would seek support among its base of move-ments and the poor.


From Lula’s part, the last year saw a discourse increasingly tinged withpopulist and social-justice themes, and a series of publicized visits and talks in theimpoverished Northeast. There was little change in the main policies of thegovernment—save for renewed attention to the administration’s large incometransfer program. In addition, while the program had started before the scandals,the administration started to emphasize its successes with its Bolsa-Familiaprogram. By the end of the year, over eight million of the country’s poorestfamilies were receiving direct cash transfers, a program that in it reduced thenumber of families in direst poverty by several percentage points. By the end of2006, the number of families on the program was eleven million, reaching somefifty million very poor Brazilians. Despite the crises of the PT and the nationaladministration, Lula ended his term with high approval ratings in the monthsleading to the election, particularly among the poor. The fourth year was alsomarked by a notable absence of enthusiasm among the organized base in Lula’selectoral campaign, with important players like the MST not endorsing hiscandidacy until late in the election.

The Translation to the Global: Alter-Globalization and the WSF

If at the federal level the PT has failed to translate the practices of socialmovements into governance strategies, the PT’s global face provides a con-trast. The PT administration has gained global prominence on a number ofaccounts. Lula, with his clear internationalist orientation, is reputed to be apolitical leader of impressive stature, his actions ranging from the symbolic,such as calling poverty a “weapon of mass destruction” at the UN’s openingsession in 2005, to the novel South–South foreign policy that attempts tocreate a counterweight to its powerful neighbor in the north. Brazil has alsopursued South–South commercial deals with South Africa, India, China, “andother ‘nontraditional’ partners” (Saad-Filho 2005, 24) and has been instru-mental in fomenting the G-20, which was formed by a number of developingcountries as a counterblock to the G-8. Since the PT came into power,Brazilian negotiators have adopted a tougher stance in defending the interestsof the country’s major exporters in settings like the WTO, UNCTAD, MER-COSUR and FTAA rather than giving in to trade barriers imposed by theU.S. and EU (ibid. 23). The growing number of radical regimes in the Ameri-cas today have more room to maneuver free of direct U.S. interventionbecause PT is in power in Brazil.

But a more clear translation has been the one from local governance prac-tices to the sponsorship of the WSF which is among the most vibrant andexciting developments originating from the global social justice movements(Baiocchi 2004, 208). After the first, not-so-successful, anti-Davos event in theyear 2000 organized by the World Forum of Alternatives, the French journal LeMonde Diplomatique, and the Association for the Taxation of Financial Transac-tions for the Aid of Citizens (ATTAC), the organizers were convinced that suchan event had to be organized in a city other than Davos. That same year,


representatives of Le Monde Diplomatique and ATTAC met with Oded Grajew,coordinator of the Brazilian Entrepreneur’s Association for Citizenship (Asso-ciação Brasileira de Empresários pela Cidadania—CIVES) in Paris to discuss apossible forum to be organized in Porto Alegre, Brazil at the same time as theWorld Economic Forum. Once the initiative started receiving the support ofprominent transnational activist networks, eight Brazilian municipal societyorganizations formed the organizing committee for the forum. In March 2000,the municipal government of Porto Alegre as well as the state government of RioGrande do Sul both declared their support for the forum. In the year 2002, themunicipal government provided approximately $300,000 and the state govern-ment $1 million for the second WSF.17

The WSF, first held in January 2001, was extremely successful at coalesc-ing transnational civil society actors and providing a space for civil societyorganizations to be able to imagine “another world” collectively. The Forum’scharter, which was approved after the first WSF, explicitly de-emphasized theparticipation of government and political party representatives. It describedthe WSF as “an open meeting place for reflective thinking, democratic debateof ideas, formulation of proposals, free exchange of experiences and linking upfor effective action [. . .] by groups and movements in civil society that areopposed to neoliberalism and to domination of the world by capital and anyform of imperialism” seeking to build global relationships (Fisher and Ponniah2003, 354–6).

The decision to choose Porto Alegre as the site for the WSF was notsimply a practical one (given the city and PT’s support—financial andotherwise—for the forum)—it was also symbolic. To the organizers of theWSF as well as social justice activists around the world, Porto Alegre served asa model of participatory governance; a city run by progressive administratorsproviding a much-needed alternative for municipal governance, where thegoals of social justice and redistribution were guided by a new form of radicaldemocracy “from below.”18 On the global level, as global justice activistsaround the world marched on the streets demanding “more power for civilsociety groups that confront both governmental and corporate power all overthe world” (Teivainen 2002, 622), the PT administration used its experience inparticipatory governance to help further this cause with its active support ofthe WSF. The WSF, although not without its faults, has turned out to be anobject of pride for social movement activists in Brazil in general, and for thosewithin the PT in particular, because it represented the successful translationof movement practices of radical democracy and participation to the globalarena.

Looking Forward

The 2006 elections saw Lula reelected for a second term in a run-offelection, with a wide margin over his opponent, a candidate representing aCenter-Right coalition, former São Paulo governor Geraldo Alckmin. The


debates leading to the run-off were polarized, with Lula adopting an increas-ingly populist discourse, and emphasizing their different positions on privati-zation. It was also a highly polarized electorate. According to polls, Lula hadhigh acceptance rates from the poor and very high rejection rates from thosein upper income brackets. Some of it, no doubt, has to do with a kind ofpopular appeal that Lula has among the poorest electors, but much of it has todo with seeing the direct benefits of the administration’s redistributionprograms. Accordingly, regional votes differed substantially from previouselections.

The South and Southeast rejected Lula (whereas at one point in time, astate like Rio Grande do Sul could have been counted on to vote to the Left),but his approval rates in the North and Northeast were very high, where thePT elected four governors in states far from the traditional bases of support ofthe party, places known rather for the rule of notoriously conservative landowners.

Many progressive forces, which had refused to support Lula in the firstround, came out in his support in the second. Brasil de Fato, an alternativenewspaper, for example, declared its endorsement of Lula, indicating, “like themajority of the forces of the left, we break the silence and endorse Lula. For fouryears we have shown the limits of his government, but we evaluate that a victoryof Alckmin would be a defeat for the working classes.” The CUT supported thereelection campaign, throughout, although not without internal contention.Frei Betto, a prominent Liberation Theologian, asked for support among pro-gressive Christians in the terms that seemed to capture the mood among activistsin Brazil at the time:

Lula still owes us a lot of what he promised throughout his presidential cam-paigns, like land reform. But Brazil and Latin America are better with him thanwithout him.19

Similarly, the MST did not endorse Lula until the second round (Marquesand Nakatani 2007). MST’s change in attitude towards the PT is evident inthe statement about PT’s performance: “Our analysis of the Lula govern-ment’s policies shows that Lula favored the agribusiness sector much morethan family-owned agriculture. . . . And agrarian reform, the most importantmeasure to alter the status quo, is in fact paralyzed or restricted to a few casesof token social compensation” (Stedile 2007). For many previously ardentPT supporters, this was a vote “for maintaining living conditions, not forLula’s political project” (postelection CMS statement as cited in Wainwright2006).

Some saw the period around the election as an opening for a progressive turnwithin the administration, particularly with regards to participation. Threeformer Mayors of Porto Alegre who oversaw participatory budgeting there havebeen vocal about the importance of returning to this practice. Social movementallies continued to call for participation as part of a needed change in thenational administration. The National Coordination of Social Movements, in


supporting Lula’s candidacy, delivered a thirteen-point plan to the president. Inaddition to demanding land reform, increased spending in education, betterenvironmental practices, and a change in the country’s political economy, itcalled for popular participation:

Popular consultations should be stimulated and supported by government poli-cies that increase participation and the decision-making of the population overits problems. Political and social power should be under the permanent controlof the population and its social organizations in order to participate in efficientmechanisms of intervention the local and national realities, aiming at quality oflife and the common good.20

It appears at the time of this writing that none of the participatory proposalsare being seriously considered by the administration. The composition of thenew cabinet for Lula’s second term appears similar to the one for this firstterm—with little emphasis on social platforms and a strong emphasis on thesame economic policies. But this second term will be different. A clear base ofsupport among the poor at the same time as the party has a narrower parlia-mentary coalition could mean new priorities. The regional weight of the Northand Northeast in an eventual second Lula term could cause a real shake-upwithin a party almost always dominated by leaders from São Paulo state. A turnto the Northeast, to address Brazil’s long-standing regional disparities inhuman, economic, and social development would be a new set of priorities forthe PT and for Brazil’s national government, and may fulfill some long-standing desires for equity and social justice in the country. But it means more.Social movements in the North and Northeast have for a long time operatedwith different horizons of possibility—unlike the South or Southeast. Being“part of government” is relatively new to the lexicon of social movements there,a basically uncommon occurrence until the last two municipal elections. This,of course, means social movement practices are more likely to be untainted bythe bad habits of “being government” and used to more confrontational prac-tices against ruling elites. Today the national leadership of the PT has very fewNortheasterners or Northerners.

In April of 2007 the party will hold a crucial congress. Part of the agenda willbe revisiting its platforms of broad alliances, with many expressing disappoint-ment after three years of a Janus-headed administration that resulted from thesealliances. Also on the agenda will be discussions for concrete participatoryproposals and transparent mechanisms to monitor elected officials. Finally, ofcourse, the administration finds itself in a curious position—having broadpopular support but much less support among parties of the center who wouldotherwise form alliances, and facing the severest criticism from the social move-ments that helped elect it, now two times.

In the end, the story of the PT in power reveals some of the real contradic-tions and possibilities of the current global moment for transformative practices.Borne of social movement visions, participatory budgeting became a platformand banner for the PT as the party translated this practice from place to place in


Brazil and built up a base of support in the 1990s. Were it not for the decen-tralization of the national state in Brazil, the institutional openings that permit-ted these innovations would have been much smaller and the PT story wouldhave been very different. The retranslation of this participatory practice and itsvision of radical entitlement and empowerment, however, did not take place atthe national level, when the PT swept into power in late 2002. Even if, para-doxically, the practice was translated globally, disseminated by the WSF andeventually adopted in hundreds of municipalities outside of Brazil, at thenational level the PT administration did not adopt real, participatory proposals.The explanations have to do with international pressures, to some extent, butmore importantly, they have to do with the internal political game of the partyas it came to power. Instead of implementing participatory solutions to thedilemmas of power, the PT opted for parliamentary compromises. In time, theadministration was locked into policies and further compromises that took itfurther and further from a practice of participatory democracy. The search forlegitimacy among the unorganized and the poor via income transfer programsmay yield electoral returns, but this is a strategy with ambiguous meanings interms of democracy within the party.

No one denies that the PT has faced a monumentally difficult task inmanaging a national economy that is as heavily indebted and currently sodependent on foreign investment as Brazil’s, and one currently functioningunder constraints of IMF conditionalities. While the administration has unde-niably made tremendous advances in certain areas, such as the government’sserious discussions of issues like race relations and human rights, and the growthof income transfer programs, these achievements have been offset by disappoint-ing land reforms, and ultimately, denial of the popular voice in the direction ofthe economy. Interest rates in Brazil are among the highest in the world, whichbenefits foreign investors and financial speculators, but limits access to credit bysmall businesses and working and middle-class families alike and restrictsnational growth. “The disconnection between political and economic democ-racy” as Saad-Filho puts it, “expressed by the inability of the majority to influ-ence economic policy to any significant degree, is the most important challengeto the Brazilian constitutional order since the restoration of democracy in themid-1980s” (Saad-Filho 2005, 26).

Gianpaolo Baiocchi is Associate Professor of Sociology and InternationalStudies at Brown University. He writes on politics and culture in civil society,with an emphasis on Brazil, following and writing on the Worker’s Party sincethe mid-1990s. He is author of Militants and Citizens: The Politics of Participa-tion in Porto Alegre, published by Stanford University Press. Address corre-spondence to Gianpaolo Baiocchi, Maxcy Hall, Department of Sociology, 112George Street, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, U.S. Telephone:+1 (401) 441–8840. Fax: +1 (401) 863-8213. E-mail: [email protected].


Sofia Checa is a doctoral candidate in Sociology at the University of Massa-chusetts, Amherst, with interests in social movements, participatory democracy,political parties, and nationalism. She is coauthor of the forthcoming chapter“The New and Old in the Workers’ Party of Brazil” with Baiocchi. Forthcomingin To Revisit Utopia Unarmed, J. Castañeda and M.A. Morales-Barba (eds).Address correspondence to Sofia Checa, Department of Sociology, ThompsonHall, 7th Floor, Amherst, Massachusetts, 01003, U.S. Telephone: +1 (413)586-5946. Fax: +1 (413) 545-3204. E-mail [email protected].

Notes

1. “Carta às Petistas e aos Petistas.” Circulated at the World Social Forum, January 28, 2005, in Porto Alegre.Available online at: http://www.espacoacademico.com.br/044/44ms_cartapt.htm. Accessed February 1,2007.

2. See, for example, “O Sonho Acabou,” the editorial by Gilson Caroni Filho, July 6, 2005, in Jornal do Brasil.

3. Oliveira 2003.

4. Saad-Filho, for example, contends that the political and economic constrains faced by the PT, including“the political alliances underpinning [Lula’s] election,” “the policy choices made at the highest level ofgovernment,” and “the constraints imposed by the neoliberal reforms” have “obliterated the social-democratic aspirations of the PT, destroyed the party’s élan and impaired its unity” (Saad-Filho 2005, 17).

5. See chapters 1 and 11 of Baiocchi (2003) as well as the case studies, in particular, the essays by Goldfrankand Schneider, and by Macauley and Burton.

6. As Bardhan has pointed out, different people have different understandings of what “globalization” means.“Some interpret ‘globalization’ to mean the global reach of communications technology and capitalmovements, some think of the outsourcing by domestic companies in rich countries, and others seeglobalization as a byword for corporate capitalism or American cultural and economic hegemony”(Bardhan 2006). In this piece, the word globalization refers mainly to economic globalization, and we usethe two words interchangeably.

7. The World Bank’s World Development Report 1999/2000 devotes an entire chapter to decentralization,and is currently involved in promoting decentralization in a variety of ways, including “supportingsectoral decentralization strategies” through Bank-funded projects in countries undergoing decentraliza-tion; supporting decentralization through loans to subnational governments; encouraging decentraliza-tion and the redesign of intergovernmental fiscal relations through structural adjustment loans to centralgovernments; emphasizing decentralization through the Bank’s country assistance strategies; and focusingon decentralization and related issues in a number of recent World Bank reports (Litvack, Ahmad, andBird 1998).

8. Brenner goes on to say that “national governments have not simply downscaled or upscaled regulatorypower, but have attempted to institutionalize competitive relations between subnational administrativeunits as a means to position local and regional economies strategically within supranational . . . circuits ofcapital. In this sense, even in the midst of the wide-ranging rescaling processes that have unsettledtraditional nationally focused regulatory arrangements, national states have attempted to retain controlover major subnational political-economic spaces by situating them within rescale, but still nationallycoordinated, accumulation strategies” (2004: 260).

9. In addition to the aforementioned case studies already cited see Baiocchi (2005) for a case study.

10. The now-classic English language work on the PT’s founding and evolution is Margaret Keck’s (1992) TheWorkers’ Party and Democratization in Brazil. In Portuguese, Rachel Meneguello’s (1989) Partido dosTrabalhadores.

11. O Programa da Revolução Democrática, http://www2.fpa.org.br/portal/uploads/resolucoes.pdf. AccessedFebruary 1, 2007.

12. Ibid., 13.

13. Folha de São Paulo, August 18, 2002.


mailto:[email protected]

http://www.espacoacademico.com.br/044/44ms_cartapt.htm

http://www2.fpa.org.br/portal/uploads/resolucoes.pdf

14. See the discussion in Baiocchi (2006) of subsequent events, including the corruption scandals.

15. See the November 2003 interview of former council-head Tarso Genro.

16. João Pedro Stedille, cited in ZNET (2003).

17. Most of the history of the WSF comes from Teivainen (2002).

18. While a number of analysts have criticized the presence of Lula as well as other PT activists at the WSFs,they do so out of a misguided understanding of the relationship of the PT with social movements in Brazil,and fundamentally a lack of imagination about the concrete possibilities that exist between parties andother actors in the global social justice movement.

19. http://www.brasildefato.com.br/v01/agencia/nacional/news_item.2006-10-27.7606341384. Accessed Feb-ruary 1, 2007.

20. “Treze Pontos para um Projeto Popular no Brasil.” Manifesto of the Coordination of Social Movements(CMS). Available online at http://www.brasildefato.com.br/v01/agencia/nacional/news_item.2006-10-27.3935757603. Accessed February 1, 2007.

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THE BRAZILIAN WORKERS' PARTY: FROM LOCAL PRACTICES TO NATIONAL POWER

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