After returning to power in a presidential dispute marked by the “duel of pushbacks”, the PT turned 43 this Friday 10, already openly defending a candidacy for the re-election of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in 2026. During the election campaign , Lula said he intends to serve only one term, in a strategy to attract new alliances in the second round against Jair Bolsonaro (PL). However, after a month in government, the situation has changed.
The narration of “Lula 4”?, according to PT supporters close to Palazzo Planalto, began to spread with two objectives: to quell an early fratricidal dispute in the party and to curb the projection of three allies of the “broad front” as presidential candidates. They are the vice president and minister of Development, Industry, Commerce and Services, Geraldo Alckmin (PSB), and the ministers of the Environment, Marina Silva (Rede), and of Planning, Simone Tebet (MDB).
Admitting the re-election hypothesis in an interview with RedeTV!, and shortly after escalating his attacks on the Central Bank’s interest rate policy more intensely, Lula revealed at the same time the total dependence of the PT on his name and the polarization – currently focused on anti-bolsonarism – as its main political support.
Streets
“(The candidacy) Lula 4 is a pacified and natural issue in the party,” said al Stadium the lawyer Marco Aurélio Carvalho, coordinator of the Prerogativas group and close interlocutor of the president. “It would be hypocritical to say otherwise.”
A member of the national executive of the PT and minister of agricultural development, Paulo Teixeira (SP) follows the same line. For him “Lula is the one who unifies the whole party”.
Carvalho admitted, however, that the PT “is aged and needs to project young leaders”. For Senator Humberto Costa (PT-PE) the party also needs to “reconnect with the squares and social movements”.
Analysts listened to by Stadium underline a challenge for the current president’s party: to maintain the middle-class sector that voted for Lula in 2022. Winning the PT’s fifth term in the Planalto Palace was only possible because Lula’s campaign attracted voters who rejected Bolsonaro . Aware that it needs this electorate, the PT has adopted the “fight against fascism” and the “defense of democracy” as its banners, but the insistence on maintaining the “us against them” strategy is projected as an obstacle to the keeping these vows.
Another point is that the acronym has adapted the speech to the left. It has strengthened the identity agenda and seeks to reconnect with its historical foundations in social movements. Even so, there are several party members who are concerned about the fate of the party.
For historian Lincoln Secco, professor at USP and author of História do PT – 1978- 2010 (2011), the return of the party to central power in the country after several corruption scandals is linked to the country’s history. Since the end of the Estado Novo, he said, what he calls the “popular camp” has been built around social demands.
“During the dictatorship, this (the popular camp) was shaken,” he said. “But, with redemocratization, it has been reconfigured around the PT. So, this camp doesn’t disappear overnight. It’s a popular camp that remains strong, because there are material interests.”
Challenges
The PT, recalled Secco, was born as a party of the industrial proletariat, but today it governs a largely deindustrialized country. There are challenges like evangelicals and app workers. For Secco, in the “fifth presidential term of the PT, the situation is completely different in several respects”.
“(2022) It was the tightest election in Brazil’s history. The PT made a big front and brought back part of the middle class. The problem for the PT is the next election: how it will govern. The middle class in Brazil is very strong. What does the PT have to offer the middle class?” asked Secco, who follows the trajectory of the party.
One of the founders of the PT, the political scientist José Álvaro Moisés was one of the authors of the first manifesto of the party. He left the party in 1995 when he disagreed with the constituent college’s initiative to vote against the definitive text of the constitution. He also felt that the party, when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, “lost the opportunity to present itself as a critic of real socialism and as a new democratic left”.
Image
“The PT is one of the few mass parties in Brazil,” he said. “The party has suffered some important defeats, had its main leaders arrested over the corruption problem, but has managed to recover while maintaining the image of being the only major player involved in the social issue”.
Another former member of the PT, federal deputy Chico Alencar (PSOL-RJ) assessed that the PT, “like many left-wing parties in the world”, has gone through “a process of adaptation to reality and loss of ethical-political principles” .
For him, PTism has not escaped the formation of an “iron circle of workers’ oligarchies”, common on the left and described by the German sociologist Robert Michels. These processes, said the parliamentarian, create very powerful summits that oppose the movement of the working masses.
The information comes from the newspaper The State of São Paulo.
Source: Terra
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