Lula for president-
PRESIDENTIAL elections will be held in Brazil next November. It will be a tricky test for the ruling class in a situation where successive Cruzado economic plans for stabilizing the currency have failed, inflation is worse than ever, the agrarian question remains explosive, and the debt burden continues to weigh heavily on the exploited. DANIEL BENSAID A S IN OTHER countries coming out of dictatorship, the democratic opening, far from being consolidated, remains under threat the army and the repressive forces have made an orderly retreat to barracks — without being challenged as vigorously as in Argentina or Uruguay.
However, the differences are just as well-known. In terms of dependent countries in Latin America, Brazil is the most advanced in terms of indigenous industrial development. The bourgeoisie there has much greater social solidity than in the Andean countries and more political agility than in Mexico. As a result of the powerful expansion of the 1970s, an independent social and workers' movement emerged and consolidated itself during the "democratic" transition, finding its expression in the formation of the United Workers Confederation (CUT) and the Workers Party(PT).
Can the PT follow up its municipal victories?
During their terms of office at the head of the municipalities and in local government, the two big majority bourgeois parties and their candidates saw their support decline rapidly. In the November 1988 municipal elections, the PT met with spectacular success, reaching scores of more than 30% in some large cities and winning some city halls such as São Paulo, Porto Alegre, Vitoria, and working-class suburbs in São Paulo (see IVs 157, 158 & 161).
Buoyed up by this momentum, the PT has decided to present Luis Inacio da Silva, known as "Lula", ', as their candidate for the next presidential elections. Opinion polls today give him scores of between 20% and 30%, which would put him in second place, if not in first place in the first round of a two-round system of voting (similar to the French one).
The right has no more than six months to find a credible national candidate. For the time being, Lionel Brizola — ex-governor of Rio and leader of the Democratic Labour Party (PDT), the heir of traditional Brazilian populism, who is affiliated to the social-democratic Second International - seems to be the sole charismatic candidate challenging Lula.
Brizola's handicaps and contradictions
Brizola's handicaps, however, are not minor ones. On one hand, while he has significant local bases in Rio and in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, he cannot rely nationally on a well-oiled and well-implanted apparatus. And in a country the size of Brazil, these things are decisive. On the other hand, Brizola, who was previously exiled by the dictatorship, has some formidable rightwing enemies. So he will have big problems assembling all the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle around his candidacy in the second round of the elections.
Brizola claims that he will withdraw in favour of Lula if it is a race between the latter and the right wing in the second round. But, at the end of the day, in order to present himself as a credible candidate against Lula and to offer the necessary guarantees to the right, he will be obliged to take a harder line against the Workers Party and, via the PT, against workers' demands and the social movements. He has already begun to do this in his pre-election campaign, at the risk of paying an electoral price for it.
Having been entrusted with new responsibilities, the Workers Party is also entering an exciting - but difficult - stage of its history. It must simultaneously lead explosive social movements (agrarian struggles and the recent general strike [see following
BRAZIL article], for example, demonstrate a capacity for efficiently running huge municipalities like São Paulo, and wage a determined campaign in the presidential elections with a minimal, but not zero, chance of winning.