Lula of Brazil. Richard Bourne

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      The election campaign showed up both the strengths and the weaknesses of the PT. It was relatively strong in the industrial belt in and around São Paulo; all told, it elected six out of a possible sixty federal deputies for the state, and nine out of a possible eighty-four deputies in the state legislature. Lula himself came in fourth in the contest for the governorship, with 1.144 million votes, behind both PDS and PTB candidates and Franco Montoro, the PMDB candidate, who won easily with 5.209 million votes.

      For Lula it was a personal as well as a political setback. Five years later, in a speech to the PT's fifth national meeting, he reflected ironically on a campaign “in which the least dangerous of us had been condemned to ninety years in prison.” Many voters were frightened of candidates who could be stereotyped as jailbirds, and he personally had misunderstood the psychology of working-class voters.

      He had promoted himself as “a Brazilian just like you”—a former dye worker and lathe operator and a trade unionist. But workers did not necessarily want someone like themselves as a governor, though they did as a union leader. They expected someone better off, and better educated, as a governor.

      Across the whole of Brazil, the PT did poorly. To the great disappointment of its supporters, it did not meet the law's minimum requirement of 5 percent of votes nationally, and 3 percent in each of nine states; this would have entitled it to public funding. Its best efforts were in São Paulo, with 9.9 percent, and the small Amazon state of Acre, with 5.4 percent.

      It did appear to be a Paulista party, and the fact that its best-known face was tied down in the São Paulo governorship election meant that Lula could do little to help struggling candidates elsewhere. The main winner was the PMDB, benefiting from an opposition to the military regime that had lasted for nearly two decades. The PDS, successor to the pro-regime ARENA party, did well in the conservative, economically backward, and clientelistic states of the northeast. In a result that indicated that pre-1964 figures still had support, Leonel Brizola won the governorship of Rio de Janeiro for the PDT.

      The PT's campaign theme was “work, land, and liberty.” It wanted to end the dictatorship, to end hunger, to provide land and better wages for rural workers, to promote better health and less profit from illness, to define access to education and culture as a right, not a class privilege, to promote equality and an end to discrimination, to prevent the stealing of public money, to end the exploitation of public contracts by private companies, and, in a rhetorical flourish, to claim “power to the workers and the people—the workers' struggle is the same all over the world—only socialism will solve our problems once and for all.”¹²

      Although the PT had been created from a coalition of factions, it ran its election in a centralized way. The same election materials were provided to all its candidates. Those who were elected were expected to turn over 40 percent of their salaries to the party.

      There were several features of this first electoral test for the PT that the party took to heart afterward. It became involved in a furious dispute with the PMDB, which saw the PT as a splitter, dividing the antigovernment vote. PMDB leaders, especially in São Paulo, called for the voto útil, a useful vote; electors should not waste their votes on parties with little chance of winning.

      Lula saw the PMDB as an enemy, describing it as hostile to the working class, as “flour out of the same sack” as the PDS, and as cozying up to the government. He denounced the way in which the media, which had built him up as a hero only three years earlier, were now attacking him. He dismissed as slander the idea that the military government would not let him or Brizola take office if they were elected.¹³

      The PT realized that it was bad at public relations with the media and did not appreciate how its propaganda would be seen by others. Strict limits on political advertising meant that only photos and brief biographies appeared on TV; by showing that many PT candidates had been imprisoned by the regime, it inadvertently suggested that they were criminals. It also learned that its capacity to mobilize huge crowds—Lula spoke to as many as one hundred thousand at a rally in the state capital and almost one-third of the population of the small town of Nova Odessa—had little to do with its ability to win their votes. To begin with, it complained that polling organizations were undercounting the PT vote because polling estimates seemed so small compared with the turnout at PT meetings. But the pollsters were right. Lula himself was a celebrity and an exciting speaker, but this did not mean that audiences would vote for him or the new party, or that all the electors were coming to PT rallies.

      There were various positives, however. The first related to the performance of Lula himself. In this campaign, in what was to become a running criticism in his early presidential campaigns, he was attacked as too uneducated to be an appropriate governor of the most powerful state in Brazil; the accusation was that he might be all right as a strike leader, but greater sophistication was needed to govern São Paulo. But in fact, in televised discussions among the governorship candidates, Lula debated the issues on terms of equality. A poll taken after the first debate, broadcast on 14 August, showed that the majority of viewers thought that he had won the argument.

      The second positive, which the party could not easily interpret, showed that it had an ability to win support outside the unionized workers. Its foothold in Acre, where the PT was winning elections into the twenty-first century, illustrated this wider reach.¹⁴ And, although the organized workers in greater São Paulo were critical to PT's support in the state, the deputies it elected were not all trade unionists and reflected different elements in the party's makeup. For example, Eduardo Matarazzo Suplicy, a former professor and scion of the Matarazzo dynasty, had been fighting corruption from the MDB before joining the PT. Irma Passoni was a Catholic activist who had been an organizer of the popular movement against the rise in the cost of living. Beth Mendes was a film and TV star. José Genoino Neto was a Marxist who had been captured in the Araguaia guerrilla campaign.

      Nonetheless, the PT's poor showing in the 1982 elections was a profound blow to activists. Many of them felt that they would do better to return to work in the unions and social movements that had inspired them in the 1970s. The handful of councilors and deputies who had won felt that they had little institutional support from the party.

      It was also a personal blow to Lula, who suddenly had a great emptiness in his life. His union was no longer under state intervention and he had handed it over to Meneghelli. He had lost the election, which he had persuaded himself he had a chance of winning. He would wake up in the morning with nothing much to do. In fact, he returned to the Metalworkers' Union of São Bernardo, becoming a director on Meneghelli's executive committee. At the same time, he retained his position as president of the PT's national committee.

      The following year, Lula promoted a solidarity strike in the ABC zone that led to another intervention in his union. In July 1983, his old friends the petroleum workers of Campinas launched a strike in protest against a military decree-law that reduced the rights of employees of state enterprises; they shut down the refinery at Paulínia, responsible for a third of the country's gasoline. Lula, who was not even a delegate to the Metalworkers' Congress at Piracicaba, made an off-the-cuff speech urging that the metalworkers should go on strike in solidarity. The congress was suspended, and Lula went off to Campinas in such a hurry to tell the Campinas workers the news that he left Marisa behind. Meneghelli had difficulty taking control of the strike, and once again the Ministry of Labor took over the union.

      The conflict rapidly escalated. The government had already taken over the union of petroleum workers of Campinas and Paulínia, throwing out its president, Jacó Bittar, who was also secretary-general of the PT. Workers throughout the country decided to hold a national strike on 21 July, in protest against the government's economic policy and its willingness to negotiate spending cuts with the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

      The strike was particularly effective in São Paulo, Rio Grande do Sul, Pernambuco, СКАЧАТЬ