POLITICS-BRAZIL: New Government to Mark End of Cycle

By Mario Osava Reprint | | Print |

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Oct 30 2002 (IPS) - The triumph of president-elect Luiz Inácio Lula Da Silva in Brazil marks the end of a transition, with the return to power of the left, which was deposed by a coup d’etat in 1964, and the exclusion of the last remnants of the military dictatorship from the new government.

Sunday’s runoff election, in which the leftist Lula took 61 percent of the vote, defeating the candidate of the centrist ruling coalition, José Serra, was the culmination of a transition that began in 1985, at the end of the last military government, headed by Gen. Joao Figueiredo.

The parties created by the forces that backed the military regime in its 21 years in power – the Liberal Front Party (PFL) and the Progressive Brazilian Party (PPB) – continued participating in the governments of the four civilian presidents who have ruled since 1985.

The first two presidents to govern in the wake of the military regime, José Sarney (1985-1990) and Fernando Collor de Mello (1990- 1992), came from conservative currents in tune with the military, although they formally belonged to other parties.

Outgoing President Fernando Henrique Cardoso, whose first term began in 1995, has been accused of betraying his leftist roots and his past as a prominent sociology professor who was persecuted by the military, by integrating the PFL and the PPB into his coalition government, and handing them several important ministries.

The landslide victory of the leftist Workers’ Party’s (PT) Lula capped a slow, gradual 17-year transition, as the new government to take office on Jan 1 will exclude the parties headed by political leaders who backed the dictatorship.

Nevertheless, a few of those leaders, like Sarney and Antonio Carlos Magalhaes, came out in support of Lula in the second round of the elections, and will continue to exercise political influence, from their seats in Congress.

Moreover, Lula did not only represent the left in the elections, but was the candidate of an alliance headed by the PT, which also included the Liberal Party, dominated by conservative evangelical church leaders.

Some commentators have described the elections as ”the end of the Cardoso era”, referring to the outgoing president’s eight years in office. The possibility of immediate presidential reelection was adopted for the first time in Brazil in 1998, and Cardoso won a second term.

But it is also the end of a cycle, with the left’s return to power 38 years after the military coup that overthrew President Joao Goulart, of the Brazilian Labourist Party (PTB).

That would have been true even if Lula’s rival, former planning minister Serra, had won the elections.

In fact, the ruling coalition candidate would have been an even clearer example of the return of the left, because in 1964, when he was president of the National Students Union at the age of 22, Serra was among the names at the top of a list of people that the military regime wanted thrown in jail.

The then-engineering student fled to Chile, and did not return to Brazil until 1977, when the dictatorship began to weaken its hold on power. With a graduate degree in economics, he joined the opposition movement against the military regime.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Lula was a labour leader, who only became a nationally known figure in the trade union movement when he led massive strikes by the metalworkers of Sao Bernardo do Campo, the hub of Brazil’s car-making industry, near Sao Paulo, and when he and other activists founded the PT in 1980.

His election also represents a break with Brazilian history since the days of Portuguese colonialism, insofar as the poor have never had access to political power, which has been the exclusive domain of the elites, sociologist Cándido Grzybowski, director of the prestigious Brazilian Institute of Social and Economic Analysis, told IPS.

In Lula’s three previous attempts at the presidency, in 1989, 1994 and 1998, his limited formal schooling weighed heavily against him. The working-class Lula only attended school through fourth grade, as only four years of primary school were obligatory in Brazil up to the 1970s.

However, the argument that it would be impossible for someone without a university education to run Latin America’s largest economy, rolled out by Lula’s adversaries, failed to influence most voters in this year’s elections, and the former metalworker became the most popular elected president in Brazilian history.

Lula’s triumph represents ”the defeat of the elites” who have traditionally governed the country, said activist Vivianne Senna, who runs a social foundation named after her late brother Ayrton Senna, a Brazilian racing car champion.

The arrival of a former shoeshine boy from the impoverished northeast to the presidency brings to a close an era in Brazil, like a new abolition of slavery, according to followers of the PT.

POLITICS-BRAZIL: New Government to Mark End of Cycle

By Mario Osava Reprint | | Print |

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Oct 30 2002 (IPS) - The triumph of president-elect Luiz Inácio Lula Da Silva in Brazil marks the end of a transition, with the return to power of the left, which was deposed by a coup d’etat in 1964, and the exclusion of the last remnants of the military dictatorship from the new government.
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