Thirty-nine million Brazilians
voted for Luis Inacio Lula da Silva
in the first round of presidential elections on 6 October. As we go to press it looks as if the former lathe worker and militant leader of the metal workers union will have won by 30 million or more votes in the run-off -sweeping him into the presidential palace of the world's fifth most populous country. It's arguably the biggest victory there's ever been anywhere for a leftwing party in open bourgeois elections.
Certainly Lula's election has changed the shape of politics in Latin America. It has raised enormous hopes right across that continent and beyond. It could also turn out to be an enormous disappointment.
The majority of the leadership of Lula's Workers Party (PT) has been moving rightwards for many years. In recent months that drift has turned into a stampede.
Lula and his campaign team have been falling over themselves trying to reassure nervous international bankers. They've promised to stand by the present govemment's agreements with the IMF, at least for the time being. They make no mention of Brazil's $260 billion foreign debt.
They've toned down their opposition to Washington's plans for a Free Trade 1 Area of the Americas. Since the first round ... • •• they've even indicated they want to take a leaf out of Gordon Brown's book and make the Brazilian central bank semiindependent.
Most dramatically of all, in mid-campaign they forced party members to accept an alliance with the Liberal Party (PL), making the millionaire businessman leader of that obscure right-wing party into Lula's vice-presidential running mate.
Yet that is not the whole story. The leader of Brazil's large and combative Landless Movement (MST), Joao Pedro Stedile, said recently that if you want to understand what's going on in elections, it's no use just listening to what the candidates say. You have to look at what social forces are lining up behind them.
Well it's certainly true that in the last few weeks dozens of Brazil's top industrialists have been clamouring to jump on the Lula bandwagon. Realising the game was up for their own class's candidates, they've been keen to get in on the new act right from the start. But beyond these Johnny-come-lately captains of industry, the fundamental social forces behind Lula and the PT are very different.
In addition to the Landless movement, these are still the forces which led to the creation of the PT 22 years ago - the left trade unions in the CUT, the array of neighbourhood and community organisations which emerged out of the liberation-theology wing of the catholic church, the left intelligentsia, and a variety of organised revolutionary currents.
Despite the leadership's efforts to weaken the party's internal structures, the PT still has a paper membership of some 800,000 (the real membership is more like 200300,000). Most of these, and the much broader layers of activists in the social movements around them, still regard the PT - their PT - as a socialist party.
And they're expecting a Lula government to deliver on its promise to make a clear break with the existing economic model.
It's true that in Brazil in recent yearsapart from the permanent low-intensity violence surrounding conflicts over land -these forces have not expressed themselves through mass strike waves or street confrontations.
situation in Argentina, Ecuador, Venezuala and other American countries has of course been different. Instead the opposition to neoliberal capitalist policies in Brazil has expressed itself more through quasiinstitutional forms - the participatory budgets in many PT local governments. the mobilisations for the World Social
Forum, the 10 million who voted against Lula: hHead and shoulders above opponents! the Free Trade Area of the Americas in a grass-roots referendum in September, now the massive vote for Lula.
The weight of these social forces is also expressed in the stronger presence the PT will now have in the Brazilian Congress.
To everyone's surprise, given Brazil's fragmented constitutional set-up which is unfavourable to the left, the PT now becomes the largest party in Congress, with 91 out of 513 deputies in the lower house and 14 senators out of 81 a growth of more than 50% in both houses).
Within this there was also significant growth for the left. 36 of the 91 PT deputies (le more than a third) took part ward, or we will go backwards. But never in the three main left slates that vociferously opposed Lula's alliance with the PL. Of these 12 are from the slate led by Socialist Democracy (DS), the tendency of Fourth International supporters in the PT, and 6 of these are themselves members of DS.
18 deputies are from the slate led by Left Articulation, a current with a mixture of marxist and class-struggle points of reference, and 6 are from the Left Block which includes a variety of smaller "marxist-leninist" and Trotskyist currents.
In the Senate comrade Heloisa Helena of DS (who has another 4 years of her mandate to run is joined by Ana Julia, also of DS, from Para state at the mouth of the Amazon river, and Serys of Left Articulation, making a potent block of revolutionary women in the Brazilian upper house.
The DS current and its supporters also elected a sizeable block of deputies in various state legislative assemblies, especially in Rio Grande do Sul which has long been the tendency's strongest base.
The bad news here was that the PT lost the Governorship of this state, after the DS-supported candidate and current
State Governor, Olivio Dutra, was ousted by a pro-Lula moderate in primaries
earlier this year.
Many revolutionaries in the PT are pessimistic about the likely perfomance of a Lula government - and even about the longer-term prospects of the party itself. However, the strength of the left within
the party and within the elected institutions, together with the very small vote
(around 0.5%) for the two independent Trotskyist candidates, suggests that for the time being the aspirations and struggles of
the Brazilian people will pass through the
PT and not around it.
Whichever way a Lula government
turns, the scene is set for big confrontations - confrontations which will mark
either an important step forward for the
left in Latin America and internationally, or
a slide back into disillusion and defeat.