BRAZIL: Realignment of Political Forces

By Mario Osava Reprint | | Print |

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Dec 13 2004 (IPS) - With the decision adopted by two political parties to pull out of President Luiz Inácio "Lula" da Silva’s coalition government, Brazil’s political forces are beginning a process of realignment with a view to the 2006 presidential elections, and the changes will have serious consequences for the second half of Lula’s term.

Within the centre-left Brazilian Democratic Movement Party (PMDB), which holds the largest number of seats in the senate and the second-largest in the chamber of deputies, there appears to be an irreversible rift between party leaders who want to break away from the governing coalition, and those who want to remain.

At a controversial extraordinary convention held Sunday, the delegates voted by an overwhelming margin of 381 to 10 for the PMDB to withdraw from the governing coalition. Any party members holding posts in the current government would be expected to resign.

Nevertheless, the two PMDB cabinet members, Communications Minister Eunicio de Oliveira and Social Security Minister Amir Lando, have both refused to recognise the decision and plan to remain in their posts.

The same stance was adopted by the party’s lower house and senate leaders, who are determined to maintain "governability". They are backed by a wide majority of the party’s 76 deputies and 23 senators.

The party leaders who want to remain in the ruling coalition insist that the convention was illegal, because it was held in violation of a preliminary sentence handed down by a judge, calling for its cancellation.

This sentence was eventually revoked by a federal district court, but not until after the time originally set for the convention had already elapsed.

Moreover, only 311 of the 519 members of the party assembly took part in the meeting, and many of them were actually alternate delegates, according to the PMDB senate leader, Renán Calheiros, who maintained that the decision does not represent the majority will of the party.

Nevertheless, other top party leaders support the decision of leaving the coalition and forging an independent course and programme for the PMDB. These include the party president, Deputy Michel Temer; Jarbas Vasconcelos, governor of the state of Pernambuco; Germano Rigotto, governor of Río Grande do Sul; and Anthony Garotinho, the former governor of Rio de Janeiro and a past presidential candidate.

Lula recognised that he had failed in his attempt to retain the "institutional" backing of the PMDB as a whole, in view of the party’s official decision to drop out of his coalition.

He can now only hope that he will be able to count on the majority of votes of PMDB senators and deputies, which will be crucial to get bills passed through congress.

Lula’s own party, the left-wing Workers Party (PT), controls only 90 of the 510 lower house seats and 13 of the 81 senate seats, in a national congress with a total of 15 parties represented.

The PMDB, which is essentially a loosely knit assemblage of local and regional leaders with no clearly defined party identity – aside from its origins as the only legal opposition to the 1964-1985 military dictatorship – has faced serious internal divisions and an ambiguous relationship with the governments in office for the last 10 years.

The results of Sunday’s convention threaten to both end this ambiguity and provoke an official party split.

Another decision adopted at the convention was that the PMDB will run its own candidate in the October 2006 presidential elections, a move that clearly reflects the ongoing dilemma of whether to adopt an independent course or remain a "satellite" of the government.

Before Lula and the PT assumed the presidency, the PMDB experienced this same vacillation between independence and alliance with the Brazilian Social Democratic Party (PSDB), which governed the country under former president Fernando Henrique Cardoso from 1995 until 2003.

On Saturday, the day before the PMDB convention, the national leadership of a smaller coalition member party, the Popular Socialist Party (PPS, formerly the Communist Party), voted to pull out of the government as well.

The decision leaves the only PPS cabinet member, National Integration Minister Ciro Gomes, in a difficult position.

And in a similar case to the PMDB, many of the 23 deputies and two senators from the PPS have refused to accept the party leadership’s decision and will continue to back Lula.

However, a process is already underway to forge a union between the PPS and the Democratic Labour Party (PDT), another small party that was originally a member of Lula’s coalition but broke away last year. The goal of the union is to create a left-wing opposition force.

This official "desertion" of coalition member parties – although not reflected in a loss of congressional support to the same degree – has taken place at a time when Lula and his government are celebrating an economic upswing, with growth of 5.3 percent in the first three quarters of the year and signs of even further improvement.

This weekend’s events seem to signal a premature kick-off for the race to succeed Lula in the presidency, a full 22 months before the elections are scheduled to take place. As a result, any bills submitted to Congress that could have electoral repercussions are bound to be bogged down.

These are additional difficulties that will confront a government that has already failed, for example, to promote a reform of the labour laws aimed at creating more jobs.

Previously announced political reforms, which would affect parties and elections, are equally unlikely to prosper now.

Two years of conservative macroeconomic policies have led Lula to lose both allies and popularity – although popular support has rallied somewhat in recent times. Now, it is the struggle for power that has sparked both divisions and realignments among Brazil’s political parties.