POLITICS: Brazil’s Workers’ Party Embodies Left’s Hopes and Fears

By Mario Osava Reprint | | Print |

Analysis by Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Oct 29 2003 (IPS) - Brazil’s governing Workers’ Party holds out hopes for the revitalisation of the Socialist International, although the signals emitted during the party’s first 10 months in office have fuelled fears of a new frustration for the left.

Brazil’s governing Workers’ Party (PT) holds out hopes for the revitalisation of the Socialist International (SI), although the signals emitted during the party’s first 10 months in office have fuelled fears of a new frustration for the left.

The rise of the PT’s Luiz Inacio ”Lula” da Silva, a trade unionist whose party is following a path similar to the one taken by Europe’s social democratic movements decades ago, to the presidency of Brazil in January has raised hopes for a renovation of a waning SI.

The glaring absence of the SI’s most prominent leaders, like former Spanish prime minister Felipe Gonzalez, in its 22nd congress, which brought together 600 delegates Monday through Wednesday in the Brazilian city of Sao Paulo, was one symptom of the current state of the organisation, several of whose member parties have been voted out of power in elections, principally in Europe.

The decision to hold the meeting in Brazil, for the first time, is another sign of the need to seek alternatives in a world that has become more complex and more conservative, at least in the sphere of political power.

The PT, which hosted the gathering, is merely an observer in the SI. Holding the congress in Sao Paulo, Brazil’s biggest city, which is governed by PT Mayor Marta Suplicy, was clearly an attempt to entice Brazil’s governing party to become a full member.

The only Brazilian member of the organisation is the Democratic Labourist Party, which is in decline.

The PT will not decide whether to become a full member of the SI until 2005, after Brazil’s October 2004 municipal elections and an internal vote by the party’s members, announced José Genoino, the president of the PT.

The PT leaders who spoke at the congress criticised the current world order in speeches that sounded like calls for changes in the SI in order for the party to join.

President Lula himself lashed out at ”countries that proclaim free trade but practice intense protectionism” and refuse to phase out farm subsidies that amount to one billion dollars a day worldwide.

In a meeting with South African President Thabo Mbeki of the leftist African National Congress, Lula said it was necessary to overcome the SI’s ”Eurocentrism”, in order for parties from the developing world to have a greater voice and greater participation in the organisation.

Also coming in for criticism was Britain’s Labourist Prime Minister Tony Blair, one of the prominent SI leaders who failed to show up at the congress. Blair’s ”Third Way” and his alliance with the United States in the invasion of Iraq appear to be incompatible with the PT’s international discourse.

Accepting Britain’s leadership of the SI would amount to a negation of the Lula administration’s foreign policy, which is demanding more balanced global trade relations, the democratisation of multilateral institutions, and changes in the global financial system, including the International Monetary Fund.

But the PT itself is facing a growing wave of accusations that since making it to the government, it has begun to abandon its leftist ideals and move towards the political centre, at least in domestic questions, by following conservative policies, especially with respect to the economy.

To impose discipline in parliamentary votes on bills that would in the past have been criticised by the PT as right-wing reforms, the PT has suspended dissident lawmakers and threatened them with expulsion if they fail to vote along the party line.

The government’s critics on the left say its economic policies have maintained the same orientation followed by the previous administration of Fernando Henrique Cardoso (1995-2002), which the PT criticised as ”neo-liberal”.

The Lula administration has deepened fiscal adjustment measures and raised interest rates to fight inflation, triggering a recession in the first half of the year.

The PT is also pushing for a more radical reform of the social security system.

Another source of complaints that the party is moving to the right are questions on environmental policy. The government’s authorisation of the planting of transgenic soy beans, vast development projects that will fuel deforestation in the Amazon jungle, and other ”pragmatic” measures are turning the environmental movement against the Lula administration.

Deputy Fernando Gabeira, one of the country’s leading environmentalists, left the PT due to government decisions that, in his own words, led him to conclude that he had ”dreamt the wrong dream,” when his hopes for the government for which he had wished so fervently were betrayed.

SI secretary-general Luis Ayala, from Chile, said in an interview with the newspaper O Estado de Sao Paulo that ”We all founded our parties as an expression of the struggle for our ideals, but we have to move into reality” once we make it to the government.

Ayala said the SI is ”stronger and more representative than ever,” pointing out that the 27 parties that joined the organisation during this week’s congress brought the number of members to 168, and noting that affiliated parties currently govern 52 countries around the world.

But enthusiasm for this week’s congress, whose theme was ‘The Return of Politics: For Just and Responsible Global Governance – For Globalisation Governed By the People’, was weak, to judge by the absence of Blair, Gonzalez, Germany’s Gerhard Schroeder, Goran Persson from Sweden, Chilean President Ricardo Lagos, Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, and Mikhail Gorbachev of the former Soviet Union.

Panel discussions at the three-day congress included ‘For a new multilateralism for sustainable development and security’; ‘The role and reform of the United Nations’; ‘The international financial system: a new Bretton Woods’; ‘International trade: fairness, employment, and the environment’; and ‘Regional integration: the new architecture’.

Other panels were held on ‘Working for peace: conflict prevention and resolution’; ‘Poverty and pandemics: the intolerable wounds’; ‘Promoting inclusion: gender equality and women in politics’; and ‘Empowering people: strengthening democratic institutions and civil society’.