On 8 April Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, president of Brazil from 2003 to 2011 and until recently the leader in opinion polls for Brazil’s next presidential election in October this year, surrendered to police to begin a 12-year jail sentence for corruption.
Brazilian politics has been swamped for the last four years by corruption scandals. They got Lula’s successor as president, Dilma Rousseff, removed from office in May 2016.
Since Lula is already 72 years old, this jail sentence may take him out of politics for good. Under Brazilian law he is now disbarred from the presidential election.
That there was corruption while Lula and the Workers’ Party (PT) were in office, from 2003 to 2016, is not doubted. Its purpose was not, or not mainly, to enrich Workers’ Party leaders, but to keep shaky political allies on board (the PT has never had a majority in Parliament) and to conciliate key capitalist interests.
Now, however, corruption investigations have become a cutting-edge for right-wing forces, with politicians of the left like Rousseff and Lula targeted much more swiftly than probably-more-culpable right-wingers. Brazilian left-wingers have called the process a “parliamentary coup”.
For a few days before 8 April, Lula refused to hand himself in, and took shelter in the metal workers’ union office in a working-class suburb of Sao Paulo where he started out as a union activist in the 1970s, a founder of the PT in 1980, and a founder of the CUT trade-union confederation in 1983.
Demonstrators crammed the streets outside the office. PSOL, a 2004 split-off from the PT which is now Brazil’s largest party to the left of the PT, said that the judges’ “decision is part of the sinister plot that seeks to cripple Lula’s candidacy and silence voices denouncing the parliamentary coup that has imposed dozens of setbacks on the Brazilian people. We express our solidarity with Lula and his family, the Workers’ Party and all the voters of the former president”.
The PT in its early years was a combative revolutionary socialist party, based in the working class, and with a democratic internal life, though never with a sharp and precise program.
Over the years, as it approached electoral success, and as important parts of its working-class base were weakened by the decline of some industries, it tamed and bureaucratised itself. In office after 2003, it attempted no more than redistribution of the proceeds of some export successes which Brazil was able to score in those years.
The redistribution included important reforms, but never challenged neoliberal frameworks. Faced with economic crisis after retaining office in the 2014 presidential election, Lula’s successor Rousseff turned to cuts.
The PT’s base had been too far tamed and demobilised to resist effectively when the right wing, seeking revenge, came after Rousseff and Lula.
The caretaker right-wing administration of Michael Temer, in office since May 2016, is unpopular. Brazil’s economy has recovered slightly from its crash in 2015-6, but showed only 1% growth between 2016 and 2017, and has unemployment at 12.6% and still not falling.
The polls for the presidential election in October now show political impasse. The maverick far-right politician Jair Bolsonaro, a former military officer who openly praises Brazil’s military dictatorship of 1964-85, leads, but with only 20% of the vote. Only one other candidate, Marina Silva, a former PT member but now a maverick centrist who backed the right-wing candidate in the 2014 presidential run-off, has more than 10%.
The PT’s fallback candidate has just 2%. Around 40% of the electorate refuse to make a choice.
