ELECTIONS-BRAZIL: The Start of a New Dream

By Mario Osava Reprint | | Print |

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Oct 28 2002 (IPS) - For president-elect Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, his leftist Workers’ Party (PT), and tens of millions of Brazilians, a new dream began after Sunday’s runoff vote, which his supporters say represents the triumph of hope over fear of change.

For president-elect Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, his leftist Workers’ Party (PT), and tens of millions of Brazilians, Monday brought the start of a new dream.

Lula’s election as the president of the world’s eighth largest economy in Sunday’s runoff represents the triumph of hope over fear of change, according to his supporters. Lula garnered 61 percent of the vote, compared to the 39 percent taken by his rival, the ruling coalition’s José Serra.

The dream is of real participation in government by the poor and marginalised, because the man who will take office on Jan 1 is a former metalworker with just four years of formal schooling, who migrated from Brazil’s impoverished northeast and worked as a shoeshine boy.

Brazil’s 115 million voters cast their ballots Sunday – voting is compulsory – to choose a new president and the governors of 14 states among candidates who failed to win a majority of the vote in the first round of elections.

Lula plans to govern through a Council for Economic and Social Development, which will bring together business, trade unions, non- governmental organisations (NGOS) and other representatives of civil society, in a ”social pact.”

Now ”everyone will be heard at the same negotiating table, not in nontransparent, separate, parallel negotiations,” Regina Pereira, a retired schoolteacher, told IPS as her family canvassed for Lula on the streets of Rio de Janeiro.

Pereira’s husband, architect José Flavio Monteiro Pessoa, said he expected ”tough battles ahead,” but was confident that ”the bankers, speculative capital and the corrupt” would not win out in the end.

Their children, Cecilia and André, who study law and economics, believe the PT’s ”First Job” programme will provide ”prospects for employment and a future” that young people lack today.

The programme announced by Lula will give subsidies to companies that hire young people, thus breaking down the obstacle of ”lack of experience” that for so many stands in the way of entering the labour market.

The new government will be more participative, said Sergio Haddad, the president of the Brazilian Association of Non- Governmental Organisations, along the lines of PT municipal governments, in which broad sectors of society share in ”participatory budgeting” schemes, helping decide where city funds will be spent.

The Development Council will also be an important mechanism for promoting Lula’s social pact, Haddad said in a conversation with IPS.

Cándido Grzybowski, director of one of the country’s leading NGOs, the Brazilian Institute of Social and Economic Analysis, told IPS that the country’s NGOs must be careful not to abandon their role as critics and ”defenders of the public cause” to become mere ”collaborators.”

Millions in Brazil identify easily with Lula, who is emblematic of the country’s poor majority: he does not know the exact date of his birthday, is not sure how many siblings he has, and mispronounces certain words.

The president-elect’s birth certificate shows that he was born on Oct 6, 1945, but his mother always said his real birthday was Oct 27 – a confusion that is common among Brazil’s poor, who often register their children late or fail to do so at all.

If his mother was right, Lula was elected president of this country of 170 million, Latin America’s giant, the day he turned 57 years old. But if his birth certificate was correct, his birthday fell on the day he won the first round of the elections.

His mother had eight children before his father left her and formed other families. Lula believes his father had a total of 22 children.

But in his travels around Brazil, Lula is still occasionally surprised by people who embrace him and introduce themselves as yet another brother or sister.

At first glance, it is difficult to see in this thickset man with a gravelly voice the charisma that has moved the masses for 25 years, turning him into one of Brazil’s most prominent and influential political leaders despite his limited formal schooling.

Lula was born in the northeast, and at the age of seven followed the route taken by so many impoverished people from Brazil’s poorest region, migrating with his mother and siblings to the slums of Sao Paulo, Brazil’s largest city. Mistreated and abandoned by his father, he worked as a shoeshine boy and later as an errand-boy at a laundry.

Through a vocational-technical course, he became a metalworker at the age of 18, which changed his life.

When he lost his pinky finger in an accident on the job, he had to learn how to wash his face without letting the water leak out through the spot where his finger should have been, he said in a moment of comic relief in the election campaign.

He became a trade unionist, and in 1975 was elected president of the Union of Metalworkers of Sao Bernardo do Campo, the hub of Brazil’s auto-making industry.

From 1978 to 1981, when Brazil was still under military dictatorship, Lula headed historic strikes that turned him into a national hero.

Out of those strikes emerged a new trade union movement, which gave rise to the 1980 founding, by Lula and other labour and social leaders, of the leftist Workers’ Party (PT), which brought together militant trade unions, intellectuals, and social and religious activists with socialist ideals.

In 1983, Lula also helped found the Central Unica de Travalhadores (CUT), the country’s largest trade union.

Lula was elected to the lower house of parliament in 1986, and in 1989 he ran for the presidency for the first time. By just a few votes, he was defeated by another young politician, Fernando Collor de Mello, who was impeached and removed by parliament in 1992, for corruption.

In 1994 and 1998, Lula was defeated by Fernando Henrique Cardoso, who was made virtually unbeatable by the success of the Plan Real, which he designed as finance minister, that put an end to three decades of hyperinflation.

Throughout the 1990s, Lula got ready to stand in this year’s elections in completely different conditions. He created the Citizenship Institute, to formulate public policy proposals, and travelled around the country to gain updated first-hand knowledge of the realities experienced by Brazilians from all walks of life. He called it an ”intensive course on Brazil.”

His grey hairs, now abundant in his thick, dark beard and hair, along with his new look – he now wears stylish business suits – helped give him an air of respectability that dissipated the fears of many Brazilians and the scorn of others towards the former factory worker with little formal schooling who meant to become president.

In any case, his close familiarity with his country, his newly toned-down, moderate discourse, and his constant willingness to engage in dialogue, not to mention the plunge in popularity of the Cardoso administration, modified his relationship with the middle classes and the business community.

Nevertheless, Lula ran into some difficulty when it came to courting the female vote. His charisma as a trade union leader has traditionally had more of an effect on men than women. For that reason, he brought his wife, Marisa Leticia da Silva, with whom he has been married 28 years and has four children, into his campaign.

Lula’s triumph represents ”the union of the nation with the people,” and access to power by the marginalised and excluded, said Grzybowski, the director of the Brazilian Institute of Social and Economic Analysis.

Lula has put an end to a political and cultural tradition of exclusion, regardless of how well his government performs, according to the analyst.