The ashes were still being washed from the streets that staged the Rio de Janeiro carnival when Brazilians' eyes immediately turned to the two big events ahead in 2006: the soccer World Cup in Germany in June-July and the national presidential elections in October. If for the first no Brazilian has any doubt about who is going to win, for the second things are not so sure. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has been maintaining a strong lead in the opinion polls, but three new factors may yet influence his standing and that of the government he leads:
- the resignation on 28 March of the finance minister Antonio Palocci, after he was accused of involvement in a smear campaign relating to his period as mayor of Ribeirão Preto, a town in São Paulo state. The charges make Palocci an unexpected casualty of the mensalão (illegal vote-buying and campaign finance) scandal that dominated Brazilian politics in the second half of 2006, tarnishing Lula's ruling Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT) and precipitating the resignation of several of his senior allies, including long-term aide José Dirceu. Palocci, a figure respected by the international financial community, has been replaced by Guido Mantega, president of the state development bank BNDES, and an advocate of a more interventionist policy stance
- the publication of a report about the mensalão published on 28 March, written by federal deputy Osmar Serraglio, which for the first time in an official document charges that Lula himself was aware of the money-for-votes practice during his presidency (though there is no suggestion that he took an active part). The report,the result of a congressional inquiry, will be referred to legislators for approval by 11 April
- the selection by the opposition Partido da Social Democracia Brasileira (PSDB) on 14 March of the candidate who will challenge Lula in the first round of the presidential election on 1 October: Geraldo Alckmin, the governor of São Paulo state.
The three events will impact differently on the political scene. The replacement of Palocci by Mantega, who tends to favour a reduction in interest rates as part of a more flexibile monetary policy, will alter the balance inside the government; the focus on Lula's role in the money-for-votes affair comes at a time when he has recovered his popular appeal after a difficult year; and the nomination of Alckmin poses a challenge to the president and ruling party to define anew their vision of Brazil's future.
The full political significance of the first two events will only become clear in the coming weeks. It is already evident, however, that the resignation of Palocci will be keenly felt. The president has now lost the third part of the "triangle" of power established at the beginning of his term in October 2002, with Lula himself at the apex and Dirceu and Palocci on the vertices; after the powerful José Dirceu and now Antonio Palocci have fallen in the backwash of the corruption scandal, everything is in Lula's hands. It will be a very hard test for him as president and as a politician.
If Lula survives the first two events, the third will help to shape the course of Brazilian politics in the next seven months. The circumstances of Alckmin's selection, and their place in the development of party politics in Brazil during the past generation, help explain why.
Arthur Ituassu is professor of international relations at the Pontifícia Universidade Católica, Rio de Janeiro. His website is here
Also by Arthur Ituassu on Brazil in openDemocracy:
"Lula and Brazil: new beginning or dead end? " (May 2005)
"A big mess in Brazil" (June 2005)
"Lula: the dream is over" (August 2005)
"Brazil: never the same again" (October 2005)
"Farewell José, farewell 2005"
(December 2005)
"Lulas flame still burns" (January 2006)
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São Paulo vs São Paulo
The selection of Geraldo Alckmin was the result of three months of party dispute within the PSDB between his supporters and those of the mayor of São Paulo city and favourite for the candidacy, José Serra. Serra had performed better than Alckmin in most opinion surveys, and had the support of the PSDB's senior figures (party president and senator Tasso Gereissati, Minas Gerais's governor Aécio Neves, and former president Fernando Henrique Cardoso); but on 14 March he abandoned the fight, a decision that is being credited to the strong support for Alckmin among the party's supporters. The São Paulo mayor is known as a very aggressive politician who antagonised many inside the PSDB when he waged a campaign to win the party's nomination in 2002 as Cardoso's two terms as Brazil's president were ending and Lula was rising.
The PSDB's choice of candidate means that a new era in current Brazilian politics is being consolidated, marked by the contest between the two big parties that today operate on the centre-left and the centre-right of the political spectrum. The competition between the Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT) and the Partido da Social Democracia Brasileira in the October election reflects the completion of the transition to "normal" democratic politics in Brazil over the past generation, and makes the political situation in the country now more similar to that in Chile (or at least to what we call and think of as "Chilean") than to that in Venezuela, Bolivia or Peru.
In search of party politics
The current developments within party politics in Brazil are rooted in events under the military regime of 1964-1985. After the coup of 1964, the government of the president and general Castello Branco established new rules for Brazilian politics. He dissolved all political parties, cancelled the mandate of some federal and state congressmen (elected by the people) and decided that only congress would be capable of electing the president. Finally, after washing out the politicians that they did not like, the military divided Brazilian politics into two big parties: the Arena (Aliança Renovadora Nacional) and the MDB (Movimento Democrático Brasileiro).
These were the only parties permitted until 1979. During this time, the Arena worked in support of the military regime and the MDB made some kind of "controlled opposition".
In 1974, the political situation started to become critical for the military regime. General Ernesto Geisel became the fourth president (1974-79) under military rule exactly when the milagre econômico (the "miracle" period since 1969 when Brazil's economy had grown by 12% a year) was over and the country was experiencing the first symptoms of very high inflation and an immense external public debt that would hurt Brazilians throughout the 1980s (most acutely in the international debt crisis of 1982).
In the elections of November 1974 for the national congress, the MDB won sixteen seats in the senate, against six for the Arena. In addition, the opposition gained more than a third of the seats in the lower chamber (Câmara dos Deputados). The Geisel administration attempted (through its minister of justice Armando Falcão) to control the growing role of the MDB in Brazilian politics by proposing a law restricting political reporting and debate in the media. The congress, still controlled by the military, approved what came to be known as the Lei Falcão on 1 July 1976.
However, by the mid-1970s the forces driving Brazil towards a democratic restoration were gathering strength. This became especially clear after the assassination of the journalist Vladimir Herzog in a military prison in São Paulo in 1975. The military rulers tried to portray it as suicide, but a reborn Brazilian civil society united to campaign for truth over the issue.
Even Geisel himself was forced to acknowledge this trend, and in 1978 he abandoned the AI-5 (the institutional mechanism that the military had created to establish a dictatorship in Brazil), brought back habeas corpus and opened the way to democracy. A year later, he re-established proper party politics in the country.
In the new context, the Arena transformed itself into the Partido Democrático Social (PDS), the MDB became the Partido do Movimento Democrático Brasileiro (PMDB), and new parties entered the political arena among them the Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT), which became the foundation of four successive presidential campaigns bids by the former metal-worker and trade-union leader, Luís Inácio Lula da Silva.
By the early 1980s, Brazil was in ferment in the expectation of democratisation and the election of the first civilian president since 1964. In 1984, millions of Brazilians took to the streets demanding that the following year's election would be by direct popular mandate (the Diretas Já movement). But congress decided to reserve exclusively to itself the right to choose the president.
The PDS nominated the former governor of São Paulo, Paulo Salim Maluf; against him, Tancredo Neves ran with the support of the PMDB and the recently created Frente Liberal. The Frente Liberal, a formation supported by rightwing dissidents like José Sarney and former vice-presidents Marco Maciel and Aureliano Chaves, was the seed of the current Partido da Frente Liberal (PFL) which is to the right of the PSDB on the political spectrum.
This conservative alliance won the day in congress, which chose Tancredo Neves on 15 January 1985 as Brazil's next president. However, Tancredo succumbed to ill-health on the eve of his inauguration, and José Sarney became instead the first president (1985-90) of the new era of Brazilian democratic politics. In 1988, a new constitution re-established fully democratic rule and a direct popular vote for the next presidential election in 1989.
In 1988, a number of leading PMDB members dissatisfied with the party's direction broke away to form a new vehicle seeking to combine economic development with a politics of social justice. Among them were the former governor of São Paulo, Mario Covas (the political mentor of Geraldo Alckmin), Fernando Henrique Cardoso, José Serra and Ciro Gomes (minister of national integration in Lula's current government).
The 1989 presidential election saw twenty-one candidates competing for the post, including grandees such as the former governor of Rio de Janeiro and Rio Grande do Sul, Leonel Brizola. Mario Covas was the PSDB's candidate and Lula contested his first presidential election for the PT; but the winner was the rightwinger Fernando Collor de Mello.
Three years of Collor de Mello's dreadful economic management ended with his impeachment and resignation in December 1992 following a corruption scandal. The term in office of his vice-president and replacement, Itamar Franco, ended in 1994 with the country in severe economic crisis. But this year also proved a turning-point: Fernando Henrique Cardoso was appointed to take charge of the Ministério da Fazenda, and with his colleagues Gustavo Franco and Pedro Malan implemented the Real plan which finally brought financial stability to Brazil.
The political reward of Cardoso's economic wizardry was to become the "accidental president" (a description he appropriates for the title of his bestselling autobiography), winning two consecutive terms in office (1995-2002) and consolidating the PSDB at the forefront of Brazilian politics.
Lula himself fought three elections during these years one against Collor (1989) and two against Fernando Henrique Cardoso (1994 and 1998) which, though unsuccessful, helped the PT to become one of the biggest parties in the country. In opposition, the Partido dos Trabalhadores nurtured its image as a force of hope and change among the Brazilian people (an image that would be severely dented by the corruption scandals of Lula's first term in office).
The fact that the PSDB and the PT did not form any kind of alliance during this period was to prove decisive for the later political evolution of the country. Although many people desired such an accommodation during the Cardoso years, the two parties preferred to remain apart, concentrating on their respective projects, and developing their position as polar rivals across the Brazilian political spectrum. A decade-long democratic era has seen them alternate power at the federal level, learn the virtues of compromise within the democratic system and with the possibilities of social reform, in ways that have avoided testing the limits of the country's institutions (although the changes Cardoso made to allow him to stand for re-election after his first term was not a model of respect for Brazil's political order).
The two parties are different but only in details. The PT is mostly more "nationalist"; the PSDB is mostly more "internationalist". The PT's foreign policy is more "developing-world biased", but both defend the role of international institutions as a way to a more peaceful world and a larger Brazilian leadership. The PT is less dependent on the financial community; the PSDB is less intimately linked to, and dependent on, the unions and public employees.
Today, however, both value a political and economic stability that aspires to bring Brazil closer to a Chilean ideal rather than the model of revolutionaries like Venezuela's president Hugo Chávez or Bolivia's Evo Morales. This is good for Brazil's institutions as well as for Brazilians themselves.
Alckmin vs Lula
The first opinion poll measuring opinion on the Brazilian presidential election after Alckmin's nomination (published in the newspaper Folha de São Paulo on 19 March) suggested that first-round support for Lula is at 42% against Alckmin's 23%; in third place is the PMDB's possible candidate Anthony Garotinho, with 12%. (Garotinho's numbers are unchanged since June 2005, whereas Alckmin's are up from 15%). In a second-round run-off, Lula would win with 50% against Alckmin's 38%. Not surprisingly, Lula is trying to persuade the PMDB to support his re-election, while Alckmin is inviting the PFL to run with him.
But it is important to recall that the race has just begun, and the effect of Antonio Palocci's downfall and Osmar Serraglio's report will take time to emerge. Meanwhile, with the political polarisation between the PSDB and the PT, the great winner of Brazil's next elections in a new era for democracy is the country's political institutions, a powerful force that can drive development and help politics to contemplate the real needs of the Brazilian people.
