Results best wherever left dominated campaign • "disaster" in São Paulo
Electorat warning for Workers Party
• The national vote for the PT was very uneven. Why?
Our success in Porto Alegre is the result of a process of maturity, internal unity, and harmonious relations between the administration and the executive team in the town hall, and between this team and the party.
The rest of the PT should look at our experience here.
To guarantee this cohesion, we have always reflected the proportional importance [of the various currents of the PT, in the functioning of the party]. We respect our diversity. PT comrades here respect and tolerate each other, because together they have built a leading body which has real legitimacy.
It is the municipal leadership of the PT which has built the party down here. We could not have done so without a recognised. collective leadership, united on a common programme. In almost all the towns where the PT has had political and electoral prob lems, the opposite has been true: a lack of maturity in the leadership, a lack of political and programmatic cohesion, personal amand internal confrontations between the elected representatives, the candidates, and the organs of the party.
Our electoral and institutional advance has not been accompanied by advances in our programmatic cohesion and our ideological identity. And this is essential for the long-term development of the party.
The biggest challenge to our election campaign was to explain how and why our policies here in Porto Alegre would be different from those applied in Espirito Santo state, [where the PT governor has followed neo-liberal policies, and sacked large numbers of public sector workers]. Policies which look just like those implemented by
If this situation continues, it will create insurmountable obstacles for the construction of the PT as a strategic alternative for Brazilian society. This degeneration contradict everything we have fought for so many years. It destroys our credibility, and could eventually lead the public to consider us as no different from the other parties. • Some people say the only way to widen the audience is to widen the party's coalition strategy. Surely this threatens to weaken PT ideas.
Exactly. The strategy is absurd. It is surrender: the ideological and political defeat of the sectors which put forward such suggestions. Look at São Paulo. Even if we could win the votes of everyone who voted for the PSDB and PMDB, [centre parties] which in reality stand for neo-liberal policies, we would still not be sure to win a second-round run-off [against a rightist candidate]. That isn't the way to go. An electoral victory that way would mean abandoning our project. The real challenge is to win the support of all those people who have illusions in [right populist outgoing mayor] Maluf.*
Millions of exploited workers voted for Maluf's hand-picked successor. Unemployed people, marginalised people. If we do not fight the political battle, if we start thinking that the only solution is to widen and widen our alliances to the point where we link up with our adversaries, then we will destroy the
PT. We will neuter our project, and our victories will not be solid ones. And we will have abandoned the only thing which can give us a stable improved position: the conquest of the trade union and popular move-
The PT could win its way into the second round of elections in all the cities of Brazil, if only we knew how to listen to popular struggles against unemployment and inequality. Struggles for a fair minimum wage, housing, free public health care, and the rights of real citizens. That is why the people of Porto Alegre voted for the PT.
The party will never progress in São
Paulo if it continues identifying itself with the moderate camp. For example, Luiza
Erundina, PT candidate for mayor of São Paulo launched her campaign with the slogan
'The PT which savs 'Yes!'
The situation in the São Paulo region is very alarming. We are loosing votes, elected representatives and town halls. This should trigger the alarm bells. What is going wrong here? It's time for serious self-criticism.
For me, the problem is our weakness, rather than the strength of our opponents.
If Maluf has support in São Paulo today, it is precisely because we decided not to challenge him for his social base. In Porto Alegre we won because we are a party of the popular classes. Because this is what we are and what we remain, we can attempt to win other sectors of the population too, without loosing our sense of direction. • What is to be done inside the PT?
The other problem in São Paulo is the disgraceful political sectarianism. How can those who are completely intolerant in their own party respect democracy in the municipal council, and in their dealings with the population? And if the local leadership cannot win members confidence, and unite people behind a coherent programme, then in the medium term the party will begin to dis-
The party must have the ability to be the catalyst that brings out the demands that reflect popular interest and struggles. We must be capable of mobilising our own militants. And the party needs to build its financial independence from the elected bodies, which is not the case in some areas.
If we want the PT to remain true to its origins, and to its alternative, anti-capitalist project, then we must build up the PT. Not just as a political reference, but as an organisation, a structure which corresponds to the project which the party has set for itself. If the Pi does not consolidate its organisational and material structure, if it does not start worrying about the training of full-timers and local office-holders, if local power-centres, well-connected mayors and deputies can make all the decisions, we won't be a party any more, just a well-informed network, dependent on its elected representatives.
Brazil *
Can you give an example?
Now that we have participated in more than ten elections, we have stopped criticising the Brazilian system of representative democracy. We don't debate this any more, and we don't campaign about it. This demonstrates the extent to which we have abandoned our strategic concepts.
If we want to build another society, and another state, then we should struggle and argue for these "utopian" values, even inside the institutions of that state, as they are today.
We should start by taking control of the salaries of our deputies, and considering that their mandate is a mandate entrusted to them by the party. This could mean creating more direct forms of democracy. where the voters and the party can control their elected representatives. At the moment, Brazilian deputies are like feudal landlords. They
"own" a certain number of votes. They are accountable to no-one. This has nothing in common with the higher parliamentary form we want to create. If we don't educate our members about this problem now, we will never do it.
In Porto Alegre we have developed some elements of direct, participatory democracy, which go in this direction. Citizens who take part in the participatory budget process take possession of information, and begin to demystify the state. They take possession of "politics". They begin to have a critical analysis of traditional representative democracy. They begin to see that, although it is better than a dictatorship, the current system is not the kind of democracy which we want. It isn't the kind of democracy which permits the citizen and the worker to take the place of the legislator. And that is the essence of a future, socialist society. The citizen must control the legislative process, and the budget, as directly as possible. Indeed, the level of direct control is the best "thermometer" for measuring the strength of the democracy of a society. * Notes Source: Em Tempo 11/1996 1. In Porto Alegre and many other places, the PT fought the elections as part of a "Popular Front" with the Brazilian Socialist Party (PSB), the Communist Party of Brazil (PCB) and other left forces. 2. For more information on the participative budget system, see "The PT in local government: direct democracy?" by Thomas Coutrot, International Viewpoint #282 (November 1996) p.26 3. In Diadema, one of the larger working-class suburbs of São Paulo, managed by the PT since 1988, the PT candidate (who had manipulated the internal selection procedure to become candidate), distanced himself from the outgoing PT team in the town hall, and refused their support. He was beaten by a social-democratic candidate, himself a former member of the PT. The party's national leadership was reluctant to condemn this behaviour, since the candidate concerned was one of the most faithful supporters of the majority current in the PT leadership. 4. Maluf, appointed as governor of São Paulo under the military dictatorship, was elected as mayor in 1992, defeating Luiza Erundina, PT mayor in 1988-92. Brazil's constitution prevented Maluf from standing again in 1996. His hand-picked successor, Pitta, beat Luiza Erundina in the second round.
February 1997 #285 11