The Brazilian government is still leftist

...In his inauguration speech, he preached patience, serenity, and above all, solidarity with those in Brazil who were still not able to have food three times a day...

...The composition of the council—approximately 50 percent businesspeople, 15 percent trade unionists, and the remainder chiefly famous personalities of Brazilian philanthropic and other civil society associations— has been criticized by people suspicious that it will become a populist instrument that Lula could use to circumvent Congress and its institutionalized mechanisms of political representation...

...He announced a nationwide campaign to eradicate hunger through a social program known as Fome Zero (Zero Hunger...

...But the returns are possibly even higher...

...After many years of stable prices, con 28 n DISSENT / Summer 2003 trolling inflation no longer seemed an issue...

...They fought the military regime in a wave of strikes spanning a ten year period from 1969-1979 and, as opposed to the so-called pelegos, never negotiated with the state for particular privileges, but struggled directly against their employers for concrete material gains...

...Criticism has come from all sides, but especially from people anxious for the changes promised during the campaign...

...it runs 30 n DISSENT / Summer 2003 many municipalities...

...The trade union movements in Sao Bernardo that gave birth to the PT in the early 1980s had affirmed their identity as unions that struggled for the workers' interests, thus differentiating themselves from the corporatist union tradition of an earlier Brazil...

...The present combination of macroeconomic conservatism and social welfarism adopted by Lula and his government hardly constitutes a leftist agenda...

...Lula and his campaign staff had a large degree of freedom to build alliances with parties to the center, something the PT had been reluctant to do previously...

...The effort to eradicate hunger, on the other hand, has been paralyzed by technical and administrative quarrels about how it should be implemented—issues such as giving out coupons, magnetic cards, or cash—and the creation of accountability mechanisms for controlling how the poor use the benefits they receive...

...It is obvious that his present route, combining economic conservatism and social programs to combat hunger, cannot achieve that end...

...At the time, many on the left saw his defeat as a blessing...

...32 n DISSENT / Summer 2003...

...Social democracy and the welfare state seemed to be a solution, but the levels of public spending required resulted in the worldwide fiscal crisis of the 1970s and the rebirth of right-wing classical liberalism...

...This time, when Lula returned to Sao Bernardo, for a speech at the site where some of the most impressive strike assemblies of the union movement took place, he told the workers to put their interests as workers on the back burner and to think about the problems of the nation as a whole...

...JOSÈ EISENBERG is professor of political science at the Instituto Universitgrio de Pesquisas do Rio de Janeiro (IUPERJ), in Brazil...

...Social Security reform, fiscal reform, labor law reforms, and political reform, in this order, are at the top of Lula's agenda for the Council and Congress this year...

...The PT has also changed, loosening its links to the progressive wings of the Catholic church and the unions, and building solid support among a Brazilian middle class that has experienced decades of impoverishment...

...But can the end be reached without these steps...

...The alliance has yet to be firmly established...

...Lula is at a crossroad of the debate on how reformist parties on the left should govern capitalist states, and we should not rush to conclusions on the basis of the first policies he adopts...

...It is the beginning of a fouryear, perhaps eight-year, journey in which many lessons will be learned before we can come to an evaluation of what Lula truly means...

...counts on the center-right PMDB to secure Lula a majority in Congress, such a scenario seems too optimistic...

...The left in other countries of the world should be patient about passing judgment on the present policies of Lula's government...

...Electoral victories have become scarcer, and many have even argued that we are witnessing a decline of the left-right conflict, a positive movement that is taking us beyond the anachronistic political language we inherited from the nineteenth century...

...The election of a leftist leader in one of the biggest economies of the world has deeper meanings, particularly if one looks at the government's main policies over these first months...

...The problem is that democracy is a wager, and in the Brazilian case, where social inequality is so acute, the stakes DISSENT / Summer 2003 n 31 POLITICS ABROAD are very high...

...Lula and his party have chosen democracy as an end in itself, to be practiced in governmental decision making in a constant dialogue with civil society...

...Ironically, however, an institutional crisis developed around the presidency of his opponent, Fernando Collor de Melo, whose involvement in corruption resulted in an impeachment process in Congress and his eventual resignation from office...

...Statist models of economic intervention that convert public spending into economic activity and wealth distribution under a capitalist world order have lost much of their appeal...

...What has now been incorporated into the POLITICS ABROAD party's discourse is a republican and nationalist perspective...

...Even though no Brazilian presidential race ever received the kind of attention from the international media that the election of Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva received, it is not only the political facts that deserve a closer look...

...From within, the more radical groups of Lula's party, after so many years practicing opposition to the federal government, have yet to find a way of making their criticism constructive for the government they now (presumably) support...

...It is wrong to assume, therefore, that the "new PT," uprooted from its working-class social origins and from the political discourse of radical opposition, is no longer a leftist party...

...The main novelty of the first months of Lula's government has been the installation of the Conselho de Desenvolvimento EconOmico e Social (Council for Economic and Social Development...

...In last year's presidential elections, Lula, the leader of the most important leftist politiDISSENT / Summer 2003 n 27 POLITICS ABROAD cal party in the country, the Workers' Party (PT), ran a campaign markedly different from those of his three previous presidential races...

...Although everyone expected Lula's victory, few knew what to expect from his government...

...A scandal involving a daughter from a previous relationship, a major businessman kidnapped on the day of the election with the media showing the kidnappers with advertising material for Lula's campaign, and a sub par performance in the last television debate sealed his defeat...

...They seem baffled by each move the president makes that seems to point to continuity rather than change...

...What is going on in contemporary Brazilian politics may shed light on what has happened to our political vocabulary in the past few decades and on the challenges the left faces in the near future...

...For the moment, we should assume that Lula's vision of the future of Brazil is governed by the values of the left...

...Regardless of this lack of self-criticism at the present moment, however, there is definitely something new about Lula's strategy as a leftist president ruling a capitalist country...

...Although leftist revolutionaries don't have to confront this problem, reformers face a serious dilemma: how to sustain a leftist agenda of constructing social equality while, at the same time, creating the conditions for economic development and maintaining the stability of the capitalist system...

...Cardoso, running for re-election, still used economic stability as his main campaign slogan, while Lula, once again, tried to no avail to criticize the government's economic policy...

...Promising radical changes in the Brazilian social order, he reached the runoff with a good chance of winning it...

...There was no questioning of the capitalist system per se, in part because the PT had decided to abandon the banner of socialism during the campaign, but also because the alliances that ensured Lula's victory included parties of the center, such as the Liberal Party (PL) of his vice president, Jose de Alencar, the owner of one of the greatest textile conglomerates in Brazil...

...The "new PT" maintains links with its past, but it is now a mass party, organized in all states of the nation...

...Cardoso had been the finance minister during the tenure of Collor's replacement, Itamar Franco, who had organized a wide coalition to support the stabilization plan implemented by Cardoso...

...Suddenly, a party born to fight for the interests of the working class in the midst of a military dictatorship, led by a rural trade union leader who had climbed Brazil's steep social ladder, found itself running a country with a stagnant economy, inflation slowly creeping back in, and an enormous public debt generated by Cardoso to sustain an overvalued currency...

...Lula's cabinet, furthermore, has been busy for the most part seeking ways to make the cuts required by the new fiscal policy, which predicts increases of this year's budget surplus even steeper than those required by the IMF...

...The Plano Real, as it was named, was successful in containing inflation, then Brazil's major economic concern...

...By the time Cardoso reached the last year of his eight-year term, however, the political and economic scenes had changed significantly...

...In 1989, after the end of the military dictatorship, Lula presented himself as a spokesman for the interests of the working class...

...it is pluralist and diverse...

...Those who were in power until this election —and who suddenly find themselves in opposition—have yet to find a discourse suited to their new status...

...As usually happens with Brazilian presidents in the first months of their term, Lula's popularity has slightly declined, although it is still much higher than that of the last four presidents at the same point, and optimism about his government still prevails in public opinion...

...The real question is whether this is a tactical move in order to reach power or a genuine move to the center...

...That does not mean, however, that he is at the center or developing a strategy beyond left and right...

...What the present agenda has enabled Lula to do is bring social actors back to the political arena, and the public debate in Brazil has been enriched by the president's refusal to use the legitimacy acquired in the electoral process in order to short-circuit democratic institutions—as some people, comparing him to the Venezuelan president, Hugo Chavez, feared he would...

...Speaking from his new social position, and all the responsibilities it entails, he called on the workers to think about the public good, so that this opportunity for radical change might not be lost...

...Recently, this problem became explicit in the debate over Social Security reform, in which Lula developed a proposal with all the state governors that includes taxing the retired personnel of the public sector, a proposal against which his party had fought for years in Congress...

...Unemployment rates soared, and the president's popularity fell...

...The party controlled two major states in Brazil—Rio de Janeiro and Rio Grande do Sul—as well as the country's largest city, Sao Paulo, and had plenty of local and state-level politicians and militants ready to engage in an aggressive campaign...

...Whether this vision will become reality is a different and currently unde cidable question...

...The policies adopted by Lula's government, and his agenda of moderate reforms, must be interpreted as a means to an end that, as Lula himself has acknowledged, probably will not be attainable during a fouryear term...

...Political events in different places around the world re quire us to reconsider the standard meanings of words such as left and right—but without stripping them of their core significance...

...FOR MORE THAN a century, the left has been engaged in an extensive debate on how to govern capitalist states when it reaches power through electoral processes...

...Meanwhile, Cardoso's candidate, the minister of health, Jose Serra, fearing the declining popularity of the president, tried to distance himself from Cardoso with harsh criticism of some of the president's policies...

...Perhaps the only serious mistake so far has been that Lula's obsession with the future of Brazil has made him neglect the need to reinterpret the historical path of his party as the main opposition force over the last two decades...

...I I ULA AND THE PT today are strikingly different from the Lula and PT of two decades ago, when the party was founded...

...Since then, the reformist left has been unsuccessful in finding new alternatives...

...Opposition within his own party has been vocal, although isolated, and a few political allies from other parties have also complained...

...and like any other political party in office, it is often subject to corruption investigations...

...Nothing has been more symbolic of this change than an event earlier this year in Sao Bernardo, a city in the industrial belt of Sao Paulo, where Lula began his union activities...

...Have Lula and the PT moved from leftist socialism to a center-left social democratic agenda...

...Lula's criticism of the stabilization plan fell on deaf ears, as the population clearly saw the benefits of having low inflation rates after almost a decade of hyperinflation...

...If Lula fails to produce a clearer account of how he envisions the transition from his present agenda to a more radical one, he may experience many defections to the left of his coalition and a serious decline in his popularity...

...Lula started the campaign well ahead of the other candidates and never looked back...

...Cardoso and Lula organized a smooth transition, but no one was sure what concrete measures were being prepared for January 1, when Lula would make his inauguration speech...

...But those who expected Lula's election to translate immediately into a move to the left, adopting policies such as state control over the exchange rate and a more independent posture vis-a-vis the international financial system, have been disappointed...

...Are we to jump to the conclusion, therefore, that they have abandoned the left in the name of pragmatism and realpolitik...

...Lula is older, and the youthful radicalism of his early days has given way to a realistic wisdom about politics in Brazil and the limits it imposes...

...In 1994, Lula's campaign against Fernando Henrique Cardoso was doomed from the start...

...Months later, many are still surprised, in Brazil and abroad, with Lula's stern monetary and fiscal policies and with the populist, oldstyle welfarism of his campaign against hunger...

...Lula knows that state policies cannot be transformed from Cardoso's neoliberalism to a more leftist approach in months, perhaps not even in a four-year term...

...Above all, however, Lula had to fulfill vague promises of radical change made to the millions of Brazilians who set their hopes on him...

...It is also important to note that, even though Stanley Gacek in the Spring 2003 issue of Dissent ("New Hope for Brazil...

...SOCIAL DEMOCRACY and its classic welfarist instruments have become synonymous with state patronage and fiscal irresponsibility, something the powers of the world economy will not tolerate nowadays...

...The political orientation of the PT has undoubtedly changed, in spite of the socialist overtones of all its important documents...

...What Lula and the PT leadership are trying to do is implement policies that will create windows of opportunity for implementing a leftist agenda of social equality and radical redistribution...

...Yet in the week before election day, his campaign crumbled...

...A consultative body composed of representatives of civil society and linked directly to the presidency, it was created to discuss the so-called structural reforms that are required to put the Brazilian economy back on track...

...In 1998, the scenario repeated itself...

...The conditions seemed riper than ever, and the PT was more prepared to provide him with the kind of political structure and campaign autonomy he had not enjoyed in his previous runs...

...He and his party are still seeking innovative ways of orienting policy toward the construction of social equality...

...Cardoso was unable to implement such policies, however, mainly because his aggressive neoliberal privatization plan—which was wracked by corruption scandals and produced little financial returns to the state—had crippled the government's capacity to start a virtuous economic cycle...

...He also surprised his listeners by proposing an austere economic policy that would keep interest rates at levels as high as needed to control the growing inflation...

...Instead, the Council has become an important instrument for democratizing the debate over policy decisions...

...The republican overtone of Lula's discourse represented an enormous swing away from the ideals that brought him into union work in the first place...

...It would be more accurate to assume that Lula will only be able to produce majorities in Congress after extensive negotiation with other parties, including those in the opposition...

...The markets reacted well to Lula's approach to the macroeconomic issues— he even appointed the former CEO of FleetBoston, a member of Cardoso's socialdemocratic party (PSDB), to be the head of the Central Bank, and economic indicators such as the exchange rate and the value of Bra zilian C-Bonds in the foreign markets have reacted accordingly...

...More often than not, their criticism of the government is reduced to attacking it for holding to Cardoso's policies, which they previously defended...

...Even though he spoke during his campaign about the core values of the left, such as social equality, at the center of his political POLITICS ABROAD agenda were more the traditional issues of economic recovery and growth...

...Although Lula started the campaign ahead in the opinion polls, Cardoso quickly caught up and won an easy first-round victory...

...Patience and prudence are the words of the day in Brazil...

...His message was, we all need to make sacrifices...

...I may be missing something, but I believe this is a false impression and that the everchanging nature of the capitalist system has yet to render this language obsolete...

...HISTORY HAS funny ways of producing so lutions to tough riddles, and in a mat ter of weeks, Lula had taken on the role of leader of a nation in dire need of creative solutions that could not come in the short run...

...the country was living through a long-term stagnation and even recession, and the pressure throughout his second term was for governmental policies promoting economic growth...

...the PT was not prepared to run the country, its leaders had almost no administrative experience, and a victory would have resulted in an institutional crisis of unforeseeable proportions...

...I 4 ULA INITIALLY resisted the idea of run ning for a fourth time, but pressured by his party's leadership, accepted the mission...

...Many of his proposals for reform were part of the agenda of his opponents in the past, and he has yet to produce a consistent and selfcritical analysis of his trajectory from a radical opposition on the left to a center-left government whose moderation is tactically necessary to any future move toward equality...

...Brazil is one of these places...

...Lula is dealing with the present moment of Brazilian politics as one of constructive dialogue to produce viable structural reforms, which can gain the approval of Congress as well as public opinion, so that, at a subsequent moment, a leftist agenda may be furthered...

...Is Lula designing a traditional social democratic agenda, pushed to the right by the pressures of the financial community for fiscal and monetary conservatism...

...As an article in the Guardian asked earlier this year, how could a Republican president in the United States run large deficits and ignore the "voodoo" policies that defined his party's recent economic strategies, while a leftist president in Brazil could adopt a "right-wing" monetary policy and make agencies such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund happy...

...The government has been tentative about producing proposals that can be discussed in Congress, however, preaching the need to open up the discussion— a need that stands in some tension DISSENT / Summer 2003 n 29 POLITICS ABROAD with the urgency of getting proposals through Congress in order to give the new government its own identity...

...Neither of these seems an accurate description, especially when one places them in historical perspective...

...Above all, it is now the carrier of a political agenda of moderate reforms: first, to put the Brazilian economy back on the track of economic growth and then, second, to enact social programs targeted at the poor and at income redistribution...

...His government is neither on the left nor on the right...