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The PT loses Sao Paulo and Porto Alegre

The end of a cycle for the Brazilian Left?

Daniel Chavez, 2 November 2004
 
SAO PAOLO - After Sunday's electoral defeat in the crucial municipalities of Sao Paulo and Porto Alegre, top leaders of the Workers Party (PT) have engaged in a heated debate looking for explanations and culprits to blame. Lula da Silva and Jose Genoino - who preside over the country and over the party, respectively - reject any account linking the municipal failures with the federal government. The outgoing Mayor of Porto Alegre, Raul Pont, and the Ministry of Education, Tarso Genro, however, argue that the PT must strongly push for changes in federal policies and in the party itself. Genoino declared that the recent municipal defeats should not be understood as a condemnation of Lula's government, but rather as evidence of the overwhelming power of a political front formed to dispute the local and national power of the Workers Party. Pont highlighted the generalised disenchantment with the federal government as a key factor contributing to the defeat. "The anti-PT feeling promoted by the conservative sectors converged with falling anticipation and hope after the changes that were expected when Lula took office never materialised", Pont affirmed. On his part, Tarso Genro went even further: "it's the end of a cycle in the evolution of the PT. We need to rebuild a strategic project."
 
After the 2004 municipal elections, the PT emerges as a loser in both quantitative and political terms. In the group of municipalities know as the G-96, which includes the 26 state capitals and another 70 cities with more than 150.000 voters - equivalent to 38,7 percent of the national electorate - the Brazilian Social Democratic Party (PSDB, led by former President Fernando Henrique Cardoso) is the big winner. The PSDB will not change the number of municipalities governed within this group (19), but exchanged some middle-size cities for big metropolises. The numbers of Brazilians voters in municipalities governed by the PSDB's will jump from 5,3 million at present to 13.5 million in 2005. The PT will move from 29 municipalities and 19,7 million electors to 24 municipalities and 10 million electors, meaning an almost 50 percent drop in the number of Brazilians governed by petista mayors in the country's big cities. Sao Paulo, accounts for much of the shift from the PT to the PSDB. It is the largest Brazilian city with 7,7 million voters. The list of other relevant cities lost by the PT includes Curitiba (capital of the southern state of Parana), many municipalities in the rich industrial belt of Sao Paulo, and several cities in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, including its capital: Porto Alegre.
 
According to many petista cadres, the most painful loss has been Porto Alegre, a model of good, modern and truly participatory municipal government actively "exported" by the PT nationally and internationally. Outside Brazil, for many foreign activists who had made Porto Alegre an icon of the viable promises of the modern left and saw it as the world's capital of participatory democracy, the news of the PT's electoral defeat in its trademark city has been a cold shower of realism and renewed pessimism. Those visiting the city for the fifth World Social Forum in January 2005 will have to get used to local hosts waving a different flag in the City Hall. But still there is room for hope.
 
The elected Mayor, Jose Fogaça, has already committed himself to maintain landmark policies initiated by the PT in previous governments, including the world-acclaimed programme of participatory budgeting, the development of Brazil's most efficient system of public transport, and political and logistical support for the World Social Forum. Fogaça, a member of the Socialist People's Party (PPS, formed mainly by former communists and an ally of the PT in the federal government) managed to lead an ideologically colourful coalition of 12 parties, based on a slogan fica o que está bom, muda o que não está ("let's keep whatever is working and let's change whatever is not") and promising a system of so-called "local solidarity governance" that would respect and strengthen the basic identity of the participatory budgeting developed by previous PT-led governments between 1989 and 2004. Not by chance, Porto Alegre is top in many human development and quality of life indicator lists in Brazil, and is renowned internationally as a 'best practice" in the field of urban governance.
 
The PT remains the largest single party in Porto Alegre, after collecting 47 percent of the vote in the second round of the municipal election, practically alone. That strength, however, was not enough to counteract the successful electoral strategy chosen by Fogaça. The well-run discourse of the opposition explicitly recognised the PT's good governance record and committed itself not to introduce changes to successful current policies, while offering renewal in City Hall after 16 years of continuous governance by the Workers Party. This debilitated the electoral strategy of the petista candidate. It was difficult to face an adversary who promised the preservation of the best features of the current government and who was perceived at the same time as a needed "new face" by a large portion of the urban electorate. Pont tried to convince voters that Fogaça was not reliable, that his public record as a Senator was quite poor and that the coalition led by him was not trustworthy. It was already late, since the anti-petista candidate had already conquered a portion of the electorate that previously had embraced the Workers Party: the middle class.
 
A similar challenge was faced in Sao Paulo by the incumbent petista mayor, Marta Suplicy. The flamboyant politician reached the run-off with opinion polls showing that 48 percent of the electorate felt she had a record of good governance. This translated into 45 percent of the vote. Even such a high level of popular support was insufficient, however, to convince an electorate eager for changes. The city, despite being the economic powerhouse of Brazil, has an unemployment rate above 18 percent and has 60 percent of its economically active population in the informal sector. The urban economy is being strangled and is barely surviving on credit. In addition, Brazilians analysts have pointed to other shameful political factors that have notoriously contributed to the collapse of the petista government in Sao Paulo. This includes a last-minute electoral alliance with right-wing local boss Paulo Maluf, who represents the worst tradition of corrupt and authoritarian practices typical of old politics in Brazil in general, and in Sao Paulo in particular.
 
The elected mayor of Sao Paulo is Jose Serra, the face of the coalition led by the PSDB in the last national elections won by Lula. As in 2002, Serra was the candidate of a broad anti-petista coalition, which saw Sao Paulo as the decisive base upon which the right would accumulate political power against the federal government. Critical voices in the Brazilian intelligentsia have asserted, however, that the real culprit of the electoral crush in Sao Paulo (and in Porto Alegre) has been their very own federal government. Francisco de Oliveira, a sociologist and founder of the PT, wrote in Folha de Sao Paulo that "Lula's government defeated Marta. Everybody knows it, but nobody wants to admit it". The dissidents within the left argue that Lula's economic policy is indefensible, particularly in places such as Rio Grande do Sul, where the PT had been for many years the main opposition to the regional oligarchy and its mass media. They also point at places where the left of the PT resisted the electoral and political strategy mandated by the national directorate of the party and presented a more radical programme.
 
The most relevant example of the success of the radical strategy would be the case of Fortaleza, capital of the northern state of Ceará, where the dissident petista Luizianne Lins won the mayorship with 56 percent of the vote, despite not being endorsed by the PT in the first round. Prospects for the radical approach are not guaranteed, however. Like in all other cities previously and currently governed by the PT, the new left governments have had to face the daily pressures of public management in a context of high social demands and insufficient resources. In many cases, the radical left of the PT has had to adapt its discourse and its policies to the new and somewhat unexpected scenario. In other cases, like in Fortaleza itself between 1985 and 1989 (during the government of Maria Luiza Fontenele, eventually expelled from the PT), the revolutionary discourse and approach of the left of the PT was unable to cope with the reality of local governance. It ended up in disarray - economically, socially and politically.
 
In the short term, as a result of the recent municipal elections, we can expect renewed political debate within the PT covering its policy on alliances with other parties through to the ideological and programmatic identity of the party. In the mid-term, we can expect that personal interests within the party will taint this debate, with many eyes looking at candidacies for the state elections of 2006. In Brasilia, the rather odd alliance of parties that support the federal government has shown signs of fissures based on Sunday's results, adding instability to the ruling coalition led by the PT. Lula also has reason to be worried. His re-election will be threatened if he is not able to (or not interested in) implementing real policy changes that would enable some reduction of the high unemployment level and translate macro-economic instability into a real expansion of the domestic economy. The winner of Sao Paulo, Jose Serra, will not be able to lead a new coalition against Lula for the next federal election, and the PSDB does not have any charismatic leaders beyond Cardoso; but with Sao Paulo and Rio in the hands of the opposition, Lula's chances at the moment seem to be dimming, unless he is able to actively conquer genuine popular support paying more attention to the voices of the grassroots.