W hen Lula makes his key-note
address to the 3rd World Social Forum in Porto Alegre at the end of january, he'll surely get a rapturous reception. The election of this former shoe-shine boy, lathe-worker, and militant metal-workers' leader - with a huge majority - as the president of 180 million Brazilians has kindled tremendous
The Argentinean academic Atilio Boron may be right to call this the most momentous development for the Latin American left since the election of Salvador Allende in Chile in 1970, or the triumphal march of the Sandinistas into Managua in 1979.
It comes on the back of the semi-insurrection that brought down the centre-left government in Argentina one year ago; the defeat of the US-inspired coup attempt in Venezuela; the mass mobilizations which blocked privatization plans in Paraguay, southern Peru and parts of Colombia; the street battles that followed the banking crisis in Uruguay.
But the questions loom as large as the expectations. Most of these mass mobilizations have, for the time being, run out of steam. Crucially in Argentina a divided revolutionary left seems to have been unable to devise a strategy capable of strengthening the first shoots of dual power that emerged •• at the beginning of the year.
Increasingly, discontent is expressed through the ballot box. Before Lula, the indigenous leader of Bolivia's coca growers, Evo Morales, came within a whisper of winning the presidency. Now in Ecuador, the left-leaning army colonel, Lucio Gutierres, who helped lead an indige nous uprising two years ago, has been elected president.
Does all this suggest opposition to neoliberal policies is shifting from the streets to the ministries?
Given their efforts to appear reasonable, how will these new leaders, Lula especially, respond to the clammy embrace of James Argentina: where the crisis is nowhere near resolved and people are now dying of hunger being
support? A es. In an open letter to Lula a few weeks ago, he insisted there were just three choices. tilateral institutions, stop paying the debt and plunge the country back into autarky and the dark ages. Wolfensohn, President of the World Bank, and the other grandees of the Washington consensus who have been swooping on Brasilia to offer the president-elect their
cording to the Financial Times columnist Martin Wolf, Brazil's term. new government has three choic
• Firstly, Lula could break with the mul- armageddon.
• ••
third
• Secondly, he could keep going with the policies of the outgoing government and the existing IMF deal. But this, according to Wolf, won't work either, because Brazil's financial position is much worse now than when that deal was done. So this too will lead to an inevitable default in the medium
grammes.
• Thirdly, he can go for an even tighter squeeze, an even higher budget surplus than the IMF deal demands - in other words cut spending even more - and thereby stave off
The signs are Lula's team has already decided to go for the second option - with enthusiastic approval from IF and co They'll be looking to combine this with some high-profile initiatives around pover. ty-reduction, land reform, maybe literacy But if Wolf is right: Lula may soon be forced to choose between the first option and the
The choices for the anti-capitalist and revolutionary left in the Workers Party are also difficult ones. Perhaps the easiest would be to stand back, denounce the sell-outs and hope to begin building a new alternative out of people's disappointments.
But this would be to underestimate the scale of the disenchantment with neoliberal policies amongst the bulk of the Brazilian population, the weight of anti-capitalist left in the PT and the very nature of this party, which whatever its leaders say, is not yet an ossified social-democratic party.
It would be also to ignore Martin Wolf's point. Conciliation may work for longer than he thinks. Simply by drastically reduc ing corruption and running a more efficient administration, a Lula government can probably buy itself time for social proBut the crunch probably WILL • come. As the comrades of Socialis
Democracy (DS) say in their document, published opposite, the task of the left now is to build the choices available, for when that happens.
And for them one of the keys to this is the • • •.• question of democracy - drawing on the