Brazilian Workers Party
Prepares For Mass Election Campaign
By Daniel Jebrac
In Brazil elections are still scheduled for next November. No less than four elections are due to take place: municipal, legislative, senatorial--and the first direct elections of the state governors since the establishment of the dictatorship.
When the question is raised whether these elections will really be held, members of the government reply that no doubt is possible since ...President Figuereido himself has given his word.
On the other hand, just eight months before the event, it is still impossible to know definitively what the electoral regulations will be. The government modifies them as itlikes from week to week, from 'pacote' (literally the bundle of dossiers setting out the decrees governing the elections) to 'pacotons' ( smaller bundles of decrees) in order to ensure its victory.
The November 'pacote' was an example of the dictatorship's absolute cynicism. On the one hand, it established the 'tied vote', that is to say, the voters are obliged to vote for the same slate in the four elections. Since only legally recognised parties have the right to put up candidates, this means each voter is forced to choose one party and one alone for all the elections. This is practically affiliation by constraint!
On the other hand, coalitions are forbidden, which means that local agreements or common lists between two parties will be invalid.
These two decrees aim to split up the opposition in order to boost the chances of the ruling party, which opinion polls suggest is trailing in
To respond to the November 'pacote', the two big bourgeois opposition parties, the Party of the Brazilian Democratic Movement (PBDM) and the Popular Party (PP) have just held a fusion congress on the 14th of February. This fusion demonstrates still further the bourgeois character of this opposition.
The PP is in fact today considered in Brazil to be the 'bankers party'. It is led by a number of old politicians who were among the 'brains behind the 1964 coup d'etat. It figured in the initial project of the 'democratic opening' as a lifebelt for the regime, offering the possibility of forming a majority coalition between itself and the ruling party.
The dictatorship is not letting this pass. It threatens to ban this fusion de facto by appealing to the electoral tribunal. Only candidates who have belonged to a party for more than one year will be validated--which eliminates candidates of a party formed from a fusion eight months before the elections. One just has to think
The idea of a workers party, 'a party without bosses,' arose in 1979 among the militant trade unionists in the working-class suburbs of
They had run up against the limits of working-class action in the framework of an official union subordinated to the state apparatus. The idea got a broad response in the young working class born out of the industrialization and the Brazilian miracle, which was free from the tradition of class collaboration.
Upsetting the dictatorship's expectations, the PT managed to obtain ballot status in 1981. To do this, it had to set up officially recognized party structures in a third of the election districts in at least nine
The PT did this in fifteen out of the twenty-two states of the today in seventeen states and has between 300, 000 and 350, 000 persons affiliated to it.
It is still uncertain whether militant trade unionists like Lula at Sao
Paulo or Olivio Dutra at Porto Alegre will be able to stand. Trade union leaders suspended from their posts due to strikes are supposed to be able to stand. The only people who will be invalidated will be militants definitively sentenced under the National Security Law--i, e. after all the appeal procedures have been exhausted.
For example, Lula, the chairman of the Workers Party has been sentenced, but he has filed an appeal. He will only be invalidated after this appeal procedures has been exhausted. This will depend on the speed or slowness of judicial processes--in other words on the good will of the dictatorship. It will wait till the last moment to know if an extra opposition candidate will help or damage its electoral showing.
Within the Workers Party, these maneuvers have provoked an opposite reaction to the one that pushed the PP and the PBDM into a fusion. It confirmed that the 'democratic opening ' remained firmly in the dictatorship's hands and the electoral dice were already very much loaded. The powerful rank-and-file current in favour of the party having its own candidates at all levels and opposed to political coalitions with bourgeois parties was therefore reinforced.
Thus , the Sao Paulo state PT congress designated, on the 23rd of January, Luis Inacio da Silva, Lula, as the party's candidate for governor of the state. We met Lula just after this nomination and interviewed him about the objections which his candidature has provoked as well as his reaction to the Polish bureaucracy's crackdown against Solidarnosc.
This interview is published below, following a round table discussion of PT leaders held before the Congress.
(DR)