Lula of Brazil. Richard Bourne
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Cardinal Dom Paulo Evaristo Arns, the archbishop of São Paulo, provided leadership in the country's fast-growing industrial and commercial capital. He decried the worsening poverty in São Paulo's periphery of slums.
There was also a significant campaign in the political class for democracy and civic freedom, reflected in the media. Lula, who defined the main division in Brazilian society as being between exploiters and the workers they exploited, had personally supported Cardoso as an MDB candidate in an election in São Paulo in 1978. In 1979, an “opposition” candidate, running against Figueiredo in the electoral college of senators and deputies, which chose the new president, had collected 266 votes to Figueiredo's 335.9 But MDB politicians were far from united, some being more willing than others to play along with the regime and its rules. Ulysses Guimaraes, for example, argued that their duty was to regain the rule of law for Brazil, not to put up candidates for the presidency who were bound not to win.10
The resurgence of inflation at the end of the 1970s and the second oil price shock of 1979 added to the unpopularity of the regime and the uncertainties surrounding its departure. The annual inflation rate rose from 40 percent in 1978 to 55 percent in 1979, 90 percent in 1980, and around 100 percent in the two following years. Higher world interest rates and the damage caused by frost and drought to Brazil's agricultural production also hurt the economy.
Hence, although the electoral package had required a two-thirds majority in Congress to change the Constitution under which the military had been operating, President Figueiredo was still taking a risk in permitting general elections in November 1982. State governors and deputy governors would be directly elected for the first time since elections were suspended by the military in 1966.
This was the first test for the PT. Lula, whose initial intention had been to stay out of the election to promote the party nationwide, was running for governor of his adopted state, São Paulo. The previous year he had taken the precaution of changing his name legally to incorporate Lula, the nickname by which he was best known, so that it could be more easily recognized on a ballot.11
Many of the PT candidates were young and new to politics. The election rules, designed to baffle the less sophisticated and barely literate, required a voter to vote six times—from the presidency down to a seat on the town council—or the vote was treated as null and void.
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,