Socialists Gain in Brazil
ALBA, VICTOR
SOCIALISTS GAIN IN BRAZIL By Victor Alba Party elects Sao Paulo Governor MEXICO CITY THE RECENT Brazilian elections, which brought victory to the conservative Social Democratic party and showed...
...when that happens and they split with Quadros, they hope to be strong enough to become a decisive factor in Brazilian politics...
...Extravagant promises and spectacular but almost invariably sterile measures have become standard in Brazilian political life...
...The grand festivals and scientific and artistic congresses which featured Sao Paulo's recent quadricentennial celebration served to highlight the accomplishments of the Socialist-backed administration...
...The big question is whether Quadros will be able to resist the temptations of demagogy, which are powerful in a nation that, for the past quarter century, has lived under the triple pressure of Luis Carlos Prestes's Communist demagogy, the Social Democratic party's conservative demagogy, and the demagogy of Getulio Vargas??fascist before 1940, semi-Peronist after 1949...
...If Quadros and the Socialists realize that an industrialization not based on a fair redistribution of the land will be an artificial economic process, they may be able to carry the masses along with them...
...What no one foresaw was the victory of Jaino Quadros, leader of the insignificant Christian Democratic party...
...He had huge sums of money for the campaign, and his triumph seemed a foregone conclusion, particularly since, as a former Sao Paulo Governor, he had the whole administrative apparatus behind him...
...For this is the most important issue in Brazil today??one that neither Vargas nor Barros nor Maia have dared to attack, and on which the Communists have constantly backed and filled...
...Barros, the favorite of middle-class groups ruined by inflation, had sought through a program of extreme demagogy to pick up Vargas's mantle...
...Maia counted on the sympathy of the Army, the upper middle class and the big landowners...
...For their part, the Socialists have few illusions...
...extravagant public works were halted, and conditions were improved in the wretched outlying slum areas...
...The city of Sao Paulo, after twenty years of spectacular growth, has more than two million inhabitants...
...For this reason??and because they have no widely popular leaders of their own??the Socialists decided to put up Jaino Quadros as candidate for Governor of Sao Paulo State...
...SOCIALISTS GAIN IN BRAZIL By Victor Alba Party elects Sao Paulo Governor MEXICO CITY THE RECENT Brazilian elections, which brought victory to the conservative Social Democratic party and showed the continuing strength of the demagogic followers of the late President Getulio Vargas, also saw the rise of a new star in the political firmament: the Brazilian Socialist party...
...A coffee-exporting country, now in the process of industrialization, with vast unexplored areas which probably cannot be exploited for decades to come, it is in the throes of an inflation which has ravaged the middle class and blocked the advance of the growing proletariat...
...But the recent vote upset all forecasts...
...An ambitious 37-year-old politician, he was elected Mayor of the city of Sao Paulo three years ago with the support of the Socialists...
...The agrarian problem, with most of the land held by large proprietors, is desperate...
...For it was the Socialists who elected Jaino Quadros to the Governorship of Sao Paulo State, thereby wrecking the Presidential hopes of Adhemar de Barros, Brazil's most prominent political figure...
...They feel that supporting Quadros can promote the growth of the Socialist movement, but they foresee the day when he will take the wrong road...
...Brazil urgently needs a bolder, more imaginative approach to her economic problems...
...Jaino Quadros surged to the fore, and with him the Socialist party...
...Sao Paulo State??whose capital was founded four centuries ago??is the industrial center of Brazil, with the most highly developed working class in the entire country...
...Quadros gave the city honest administration...
...The Communists, who are de facto allies of the Vargas adherents, denounce Jaino Quadros as an agent of American imperialism...
...President Vargas's suicide and the partial disintegration of his movement contributed to Quadros's triumph at the polls...
...For Washington, the elections in Sao Paulo are a warning to start taking the Latin American working-class movement as something more than an irksome, if minor, inconvenience to American investors...
...However, this is not as decisive in a large industrial city as in the country as a whole, and Maia's defeat was anticipated...
...Sao Paulo's influence in national politics is so great that the two chief Gubernatorial candidates, Prestes Maia of the Social Democratic party and Barros of the Social Progressive party, were regarded as the probable rivals in the 1955 Presidential election...
...If Quadros and the Socialists can avoid this, the 1955 elections may put them in power...
...If, between now and next year's elections, the new Governor and his Socialist advisers pursue a skilful and sincere course, it is quite possible that Quadros will be the next President of Brazil and that Socialist ministers will enter the Government for the first time in the country's history...
...Thus far, Quadros has remained faithful on the whole to his alliance with the Socialists and to his electoral pledges...
Vol. 37 • November 1954 • No. 46
