Brazil's Political Rupture and the Left's Opportunity
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- Published on Tuesday, 23 May 2017 23:15
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A Socialist Project e-bulletin .... No. 1419 .... May 24, 2017
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Brazil’s Political Rupture and the Left’s Opportunity
Fora Temer -- eleições diretas já!
Alfredo Saad-Filho
"Out with Temer -- direct elections now!" Amid meltdown in Brazil, the left calls for democracy, while the right must find ways to deny the people a voice.
The Brazilian Workers’ Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores, PT) won the country's presidential elections four times in a row; first with Luís Inácio Lula da Silva (2003-06, 2007-10), then with his hand-picked successor, Dilma Rousseff (2011-14, 2015-16). During its 13 years in office, the PT changed Brazil in many ways; four are principally worth mentioning, as they would come to play key roles in the elite conspiracy to impeach Dilma Rousseff and destroy her party.
First, the PT democratized the... state. It implemented the social and civic rights included in the 1988 ‘Citizen's Constitution’, and advanced Brazil's emerging welfare state across several fields of social provision.
Second, the PT changed the social composition of the state through the appointment of thousands of leaders of mass organizations to positions of power. For the first time in Brazilian history, millions of poor citizens could recognise themselves in the bureaucracy and relate to close friends and comrades who had become ‘important’ in Brasília.
Third, PT policies contributed to a significant improvement in the distribution of income, through the creation of millions of unskilled jobs, a rising minimum wage, and higher transfers and benefits.
Fourth, although the government never abandoned the neoliberal macroeconomic policy framework imposed in the 1990s, it gradually introduced, in parallel, neodevelopmental (that is, expansionary Keynesian) policies that helped to secure faster growth, higher profits and wages, and distributional gains.
