* Brazil
Brazil heats up
On January 1st Fernando Henrique Cardoso was sworn in for his second term as president of Brazil. He soon faced a
The PT after the polls In the October 1998 elections, the PT increased its relative weight in the Brazilian left and on the political scene. The election results provide a revealing diagnosis of the state of the PT, its qualities and defects, virtues and vices, as well as the contradictory tendencies at work within the party and in its relations with society. Jose Corrêa Leite The PT remains the main channel of political expression for popular discontent with neoliberalism and the government of Fernando Henrique Cardoso.
For the first time, the PT won the government of a key state. Rio Grande do Sul is the fourth most important state in Brazil, and historically it has been a focus for decisive movements of change.
The PT now has a real chance to show that it can use the conquest of state governments to push forward vital social and political changes. The victory in the south is promising because it is the result of a consistent commitment to popular struggles, to the development of new and higher forms of democracy, and to the defence of a clear socialist perspective.
But there has also been a strengthening of tendencies towards adapting the PT to the prevailing order. Processes of institutionalisation, bureaucratisation, and electoralism have been reinforced.
In spite of the good showing by Marta Suplicy, the candidate for Governor of Sao Paulo state, the PT in Sao Paulo seems to crystallise the vices which could turn the party into a series of "electoral machines" tied to parliamentary posts, operating pragmatically in the service of parochial interests.
In the state of Minas Gerais, the majority of the PT has decided to take maioritv of the PT has decided to take part in the new administration of Itamar Franco, the former Brazilian president who has now fallen out with his former protégé, Fernando Henrique Cardoso. Their decision subordinates the party in that state to a dissident bourgeois faction, leaving it no project of its own.
In Rio de Janeiro, the PT is suffering the consequences of the heavy-handed intervention by the majority of the National Leadership.' Some PT members joining the state government, and others are in opposition to it.
These are the three most important states in Brazil. And in each of them there has been a marked weakening of the PT's political profile and of any clear and shared party identity.
In other places the PT had both positive experiences (as in Bahia), and negapotentially explosive show-down by the various opposition parties Within days, the new Governor of Minas Gerais, the former president Itamar Franco, declared a 90 day moratorium on his state's debt to the federal government.
And the new governors of Rio Grande do Sul and Rio de Janeiro, Olivio Dutra of the Workers Party (PT) and Anthony Garotinho of the Democratic Labour Party (PDT), said they and other opposition governors would be discussing whether and how to follow suit.
Local and international markets reacted immediately to fears that the Minas moratorium would derail President Cardoso's plans to slash Brazil's public deficit, the main con2 International Viewpoint #308 February 1999 with state governors elected dition for receiving an IMF co-ordinated SUS41 billion bailout package.
The link between political struggles in Brazil and the international capital markets could hardly be clearer. The Sao Paulo stock exchange plunged nearly 400 points. The sharp increase in New York share prices in previous days was stopped dead in its tracks. The spectre of a Brazilian crisis also sent other markets from Tokyo to London into reverse.
The stakes for the Workers Party (PT) could hardly be higher. Particularly for the party's left wing which leads the key state government in Rio Grande do Sul. [IB] *
tive ones (as in Paraná and Pernambuco), in terms of the strenginening or a socia- in terms of the strengthening of a socialist project.
Taken as a whole, the election results show that the sharp choices which the PT already faced, have if anything grown sharper. However the balance of forces within the party, which these elections consolidated, suggests that this battle between radically different options will not be resolved in the near future.