Ruling Party in Brazil at a Crossroads

If 25 sounds young for a midlife crisis, consider what the Workers’ Party has been through in its quarter-century of existence.

After its humble birth among disgruntled metalworkers, the party weathered abuse from a right-wing dictatorship, built a committed following and survived a bout of adolescent blues. It stumbled badly in its first outings at the polls, shed some of its leftist dogma and, after three successive defeats, succeeded in getting Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva elected as Brazil’s first working-class president in 2002.

Now the party, or PT, is staggering under the weight of its history as it tries to decide what it stands for. A significant number of dissidents question whether the party has lost its leftist identity and no longer shines as a beacon of social justice in a country marked by a large gap between rich and poor.

Lula, a former lathe operator, was elected partly on promises that he would tackle the glaring inequities in income, education and health. But few, if any, of those pledges have been met. Instead, his administration has concentrated on promoting economic growth following the Wall Street-ordered prescriptions of his center-right predecessor, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, a course that smacks of betrayal to many party faithful.

“Certainly the image [existed] that, ‘Well, the PT’s going to get there and finally the social question is going to be addressed.’ And that’s precisely the area that’s been weakest,” said Margaret Keck, a professor at Johns Hopkins University and author of a book about the PT.

“People expected them to go for direct social programs to a much greater extent than they have,” Keck said. “And nobody expected this degree of fiscal conservatism.”

More than 100 PT members announced late last month that they were quitting the party and accused it of abandoning its core principles. The defectors included a prominent economist whose father was one of the PT’s founders in 1980. Party officials dismiss the impact of the members’ departure.

The leadership has expelled left-wing legislators who refused to toe the party line, sparking fears among members that the internal democracy and diversity that have long been among the PT’s hallmarks were in peril.

The officials acknowledge that the party has changed, but through a gradual evolution that recognized the need to move toward the center to remain electable. Although the party still espouses socialism, its approach differs from the days when the PT openly pushed for “a rupture” with capitalism.

“These two years we’ve demonstrated our capacity to govern,” said Gleber Naime, PT organization secretary. “And the changes may not be as far-reaching as we want them to be, but they’re what’s been possible.”

Party leaders acknowledge that the grievances of the rank-and-file members are real. They have begun talking about the need to rethink and perhaps return to the party’s roots, especially after some tough losses in municipal elections last October, including the mayoralty of Porto Alegre, which the PT had ruled for 16 years.

“We are going to reevaluate our whole path, discuss the direction of the left and the direction that we want,” PT Secretary-General Silvio Pereira told the daily O Estado de Sao Paulo.

To that end, the official celebrations of the party’s 25th anniversary, which was Feb. 10, are to include seminars on the role of the left and the history of the PT.

Some members doubt whether that will slow the party’s slide to the center or whether the discussions will lead to a rhetorical fig leaf that will allow Lula to stick to his agenda and call it true to historic PT values.

That rhetoric could prove helpful in a year when his government is expected to press for changes in tax and labor codes that could deepen the feeling among workers of being neglected by the party they considered their standard-bearer.

“There is concern they’re losing bases within the unions, that they’re losing touch with social movements, that they’re not seen as the party of the left,” said Christopher Garman, a political analyst with the Tendencias consultancy. “So these seminars are to try to reposition the PT as the party of the left and to cast the agenda of reforms of this government as progressive.”

To recover lost ground with unionists, Lula has promised an increase in the minimum wage, from about $100 per month to $115. He and his advisors are also keen to attend to Brazil’s middle class, which includes many industrial workers and has historically accounted for a solid chunk of PT support. Some party officials blame their municipal election losses on middle-class anger over recent pension reforms.

Lula had won the presidency by broadening his appeal beyond urban workers and the middle class to earn the support of the rural poor and a sliver of Brazil’s elite. He and his advisors have their eyes trained on reelection next year, eager that he not become a one-term anomaly.

Forced to govern through a coalition, Lula has had to keep competing interests in Congress happy in order to push through even a limited agenda. That pragmatism, however, has created a fuzzy picture of what the PT now stands for.

It was the former union leader’s own party that dealt him his largest setback in Congress, a defeat last week that signaled the disarray plaguing the PT.

A party backbencher unhappy with Lula’s handpicked choice for president of Congress decided to mount his own bid, and was supported by other junior PT representatives fed up with what they felt was high-handed treatment by the party leadership. Although the maverick candidate lost, he siphoned enough votes to force Lula’s man into a second round with another challenger, who won.

The loss will further compromise and complicate Lula’s ability to pass the reforms he is expected to promote this year. Party leaders have been meeting to analyze what went wrong.

Keck, the professor, said that much of what bedevils the PT is the growing pains common to opposition movements that get into government.

“When you’re still in the opposition, you don’t have to face up to all the difficulties and contradictions that coalition government entails,” she said. “A lot of stuff that they’re in crisis about is not at all new. It’s happened to every socialist or social democratic party when it finds itself in power.”

The PT has had to overhaul itself at various points and has weathered those conflicts, just as analysts expect it to pull through this one.