The re-election of Luiz Inácio da Silva in October 2006 allows us to decipher the ways in which Brazil’s political landscape has been reconstituted under the Workers Party government. The whirlwind of deregulation, privatization and restructuring under Fernando Henrique Cardoso in the 1990s—and with it, the dissolution of the industrial working class created during the developmentalist era—had torn up all established relations between economy and politics, classes and representation. The result was a period of indeterminacy, the context of Lula’s first presidential victory in 2002. Since then, a novel combination of neo-populism and party statification, shored up by social-liberal handouts, on the one hand, and government graft, on the other, has helped to forge a new form of class rule in Brazil that could be characterized as ‘hegemony in reverse’.
In what follows I will trace the ways in which the outcomes of the ‘era of indeterminacy’ were overdetermined by intensive exposure to the relations of global capital. But first, a brief comment on the 2006 election itself. Although voting is compulsory in Brazil, 23 per cent of the electorate stayed away from the ballot box altogether, while another 8 per cent cast either null or blank votes. This means that 31 per cent of voters were either not interested, or could not bring themselves to vote for any candidate. It is the highest measure of electoral indifference in modern Brazilian history. The reality of this disengagement was all too apparent in the street: there was no excitement, not a single pt banner or that of any other party, no mobilization whatsoever. The majority of voters acquitted themselves of their civic duty that Sunday with some impatience, and many went straight to the beach.
The results of the first-round presidential vote on October 1st had given Lula a scare. Despite the corruption scandals that had dogged his government over the past two years he was expecting to win an outright majority, and his campaign was correspondingly complacent, if not—in his refusal to debate with the other candidates—wilfully arrogant. Lula got only 48.6 per cent, with Geraldo Alckmin, his rival from the centre-right psdb, taking 41.6 per cent, while Heloisa Helena of the Left Front, a coalition of the ex-pt left breakaway psol with the pstu, pcb and Consulta Popular, won just under 7 per cent, around 6.5 million votes. In the first round the President had deliberately distanced himself from the Workers Party. Now, seeing his chances of re-election threatened, a visibly shaken Lula and his advisors appealed to the pt and to sectors of the left outside it. The Lula campaign charged that Alckmin would forge ahead with the privatization programme so bitterly resented under the previous psdb president, Fernando Henrique Cardoso.
There is general agreement that Alckmin was the perfect opponent for Lula: little known outside São Paulo, and with the look—a mean, sour-faced oligarch—and reputation of a paulista, which is a serious handicap in Brazil. He had no message whatsoever and was terrible on television. More difficult to explain is why the tucano Alckmin got so many ballots in the first round and why, unprecedentedly, his vote actually fell by over 2 million to 39 per cent in the second-round run-off on October 29th.footnote1 Mainstream explanations of Lula’s 61 per cent second-round score have focused on the influence of the Bolsa Família, the means-tested welfare payment begun under Cardoso but extended by the pt. In the impoverished Northeast, the region which receives the greatest proportion of Bolsa Família payments, Lula got over 70 per cent of the vote. In his first interview after the final results were announced, the re-elected president complained bitterly of not being the choice of the rich, pointing out that bankers have never earned so much money as under his government, and going on to describe the election as a triumph of the poor and those ‘from below’. This was the interpretation generally taken up by the foreign press: the country had split between rich and poor, and the poor won. This fails to explain the vote for Alckmin in the first round; it would be a boon indeed if over 40 per cent of the electorate really qualified as rich, and Brazil had been transformed into a First World country.
In the state governorship elections also held on October 1st there was good news from Maranhão and Bahia, where once-invincible caciques saw their candidates turn to dust. The pt currently holds four governorships, although Bahia is the only politically important state in that constellation. In general, though, the contests were characterized by a promiscuous medley of alliances and coalitions, with politicians of supposedly opposite ideological orientation banding together, and open betrayal of party initials the general rule. The governor of Mato Grosso, a member of the Partido Popular Socialista, which is the heir to the old Partido Comunista Brasileiro, and who also happens to be the world’s largest soya cultivator, openly supported Lula; while the pps, currently agonizing because it did not pass the 5 per cent barrier, supported Alckmin.footnote2 This looks like a reversion to the traditional pattern of politics in Brazil, and on the periphery more generally, in which parties represent little and power centres above all on personalities. During the late 1970s and 1980s, the political ‘age of invention’ in Brazil, the creation of the pt had established the value and effectiveness of the mass party within the national forcefield; that period now seems to be ending.
The congressional results of October 1st also belied the second-round presidential landslide. In the Senate the right-wing pfl, noisily defeated in Bahia and Maranhão, remains the largest faction. In the Chamber of Deputies, the pmdb has the greatest number of seats. Formerly the umbrella party of opposition to the 1964–84 military dictatorship, the pmdb is now a classic party of regional caciques, lacking even the most minimal programmatic unity; emblematically, it did not have a candidate for president, not even in alliance with the pt or psdb. The pt is still the second largest faction in the Chamber, but for the first time saw its number of deputies reduced. Lula has patched together an agreement with the pmdb, which will give him a substantial majority in the Congress. But the government will be weaker than in the first term and the cost of support higher, in the form of nominations to ministerial posts and the important federal bodies. The agenda of corruption allegations is not closed, although the government may be more careful now.
For a few weeks in October it appeared that the space for the left had grown—even this writer voted for Lula in the second round, with that hope in mind—given Helena’s vote and Lula’s left tack. That illusion was soon destroyed. The few who voiced hopes of a change in economic policy—including Tarso Genro, a party ideologue and Minister of Institutional Relations, and Dilma Rousseff, Lula’s powerful Chief of Staff—were immediately scolded by none other than the re-elected President himself. Lula’s first statements were to reaffirm his economic agenda, retaining Henrique Meirelles at the Central Bank and defending the record of his disgraced—but now rehabilitated—former Finance Minister Antonio Palocci. Among the possible names he put forward for the cabinet was Jorge Gerdau Johannpeter, owner of the largest metallurgical complex in the country and known as one of the most reactionary types in business circles. There is now a general scepticism with regard to the second term; no one is expecting significant changes in government policy. Lula seems to have entirely lost his way. There will be an extension of the Bolsa Família programme, perhaps the shifting of the course of the São Fernando River to benefit the Northeastern states most subject to drought and the undertaking of some infrastructural works. But it will go no further than that.