Second thoughts on the left in the Brazilian election

Coverage from various tendencies: the ISO (USA), SWP (Britain), the (USec) Fourth International, the CWI, and UITci/Revista Movimiento (some of these deal with some of the issues I raise here). A document I wrote in 2004 on the formation of P-SoL, which is still dated but does offer some useful background, is available here.

Lee Sustar of the ISO (USA) told me some time before the election about attending a very enthusiastic speech given by Ernest Mandel about the PT, probably in the '80s. Lee made an intervention to the effect that the PT was doomed to reformism, and speaking to me years letter expressed some surprise that he had actually been right.

A note on names in Brazil: most public figures in Brazil are universally referred to by their first names or by nicknames which sometimes seem ridiculous to American observers: for example Brazil's current president is almost invariable referred to as Lula ("Squid"). This even extends to many official contexts, such as ballots and election records. Heloísa Helena's full name is Heloísa Helena Lima de Moraes Carvalho. The strong performance of Heloísa Helena in the recent Brazilian presidential election has been a cause for a fair amount of celebration on the part of the Trotskyist movement worldwide, both among those who are trying to salvage something from their (perhaps now embarrassing) enthusiasm for the Workers' Party and those who "saw it coming all along".

With 6.8 million votes (just under 7%), Comrade Heloísa in fact did quite well. Her party's other candidates did not. If her slate, the Left Front, had done as well in congressional elections then under Brazil's system of proportional representation her P-SoL party would have gone from 7 seats in the house of deputies to about 35, and its partners, the PSTU and the (refounded) PCB might have picked up a seat or two in their own rights for the first time in their history. Instead the Left Front got about 1.3 million votes (about 1.5%) in the House of Deputies, and P-SoL dropped from 6 seats to 3, on top of losing Heloísa Helena's seat in the senate. Their vote in other areas were even worse; just under a million for state legislatures (again winning only three seats) and about 600,000 for the senate.

This was not a small matter. P-SoL was established as a fairly loose agglomeration of modest-sized groups (tendencies), and hasn't been too successful at finding anything other than election campaigns to hold it together; as far as I know they haven't even been able to launch a common newsletter. It's been able to operate in the way it has largely because of the organizational resources that parliamentary office gives. A Congressmember in Brazil gets a salary of 17,000 Reals a month (by way of comparison, the monthly minimum wage is 350 Reals and a skilled blue-collar worker is lucky to get 1,500), and can hire a sizeable staff at public expense besides. If he or she forgoes the politician's usual practice of lining their pockets and hiring their relatives that gives a big boost to the war chest, a set of free full-time organizers, and various other goodies (when I visited the PSTU's headquarters in 2003, all of the notepads still had the letterhead of Lindberg Farias, a congressman who had jumped ship and joined the PT two years earlier). Winning more of these seats was a big enough deal to get P-SoL and PSTU to bury the hatchet in order to have a better shot at them, as the P-SoL's national executive made clear (see the section Metas eleitorais in this document).

So why the discrepancy in the votes?

First it's worth saying a few things about Heloísa and how she got that many votes. Although she's been a far-left activist basically her whole adult life, she has a very old-fashioned catholic way of looking at a lot of things. She's anti-abortion and had a tantrum and broke out in tears on the senate floor when a satirical website posted a cartoon depicting her on the front page of of Playboy. I don't mean this to take a potshot at her (if I wanted to do that I'd make fun of her voice); I just think it's important to understand how this fits into her image. One part of that is the way it adds to her just-folks charm, as does her habit of dressing in jeans and a t-shirt even in the Senate, but there are other effects as well.

Some of this shows up when you look closely at who supported Heloísa. Garotinho claimed that his not-quite-endorsement was reponsible for Heloísa's strong showing in Rio.

The relevant surveys are Datafolha, April 7 2006 and Vox Populi, July 11 2006. Anthony Garotinho, the populist former governor of Rio de Janeiro who has lead a campaign to bring creationism into public schools in Brazil and one of the main figures in the centrist PMDB announced he would vote for her. In surveys early in the election season, most of the people who intended to vote for her were urban, educated, fairly well off (at least by Brazilian standards), and were at least as likely to vote for center or center-right candidates as for Lula.

This is because Heloísa was able to project herself as an honest, tough-on-crime candidate, something that the other candidates had a hard time with (Lula because of the PT's corruption troubles, Serra because of his perceived inability to deal with a massive outbreak of gang violence in São Paulo). One also wonders whether her statement on national television that socialism was something for 30 or 40 years down the road might have been meant to solidify that image.

Heloísa's running mate, Cesar Benjamin, went even further, effectively disowning the Left Front's program in favor of a straightforwardly social-democratic "program for government".

Besides the P-SoL members elected to the lower house, José Nery Azevedo, had been elected as an alternate (suplente) for Ana Júlia Carepa in 2002, while still a member of the PT, and so became a Senator when she stepped down to become governor of Pará.

Babá was one of the "four radicals" who founded the P-SoL, of whom now only Luciana Genro is still both in Parliament and in the party. So Heloísa Helena's appeal was rather different from that of the rest of the P-SoL. On top of this is one of the party's most distinctive features, its lack of organizational and political coherence. Two of the three candidates successfully elected had strong organizations in their area to fall back on (Luciana Genro's Movement of the Socialist Left in Porto Alegre and Ivan Valente's Socialist Popular Action in São Paulo). Heloísa Helena's coattails were very short, and candidates without much else to rely on did very poorly. Babá for example left Pará, where he had a support base, for Rio de Janeiro, where Heloísa was expected to get the largest number of votes, and failed to get back into congress as a result. Even Heloísa's Enlace faction was unable to get its two congressmembers, Maninha and João Alfredo, reelected.

In the aftermath Cesar Benjamin left the P-SoL, describing its leadership as "a rare combination of ignorance, truculence, and arrogance". This was by no means the first high profile defection the party has suffered in its short existence. P-SoL is no closer than it was at its foundation to a unified perspective or any meaningful common actions.

The overarching lesson if there is one, is that there is no substitute for the left for the hard work of building a powerful organization with a coherent worldview and capable of common action. Not only is electoral success not a substitute for it, but without a strong organization it's extremely difficult to even take advantage of it,

In a different way, Venezuela is an example of this. Chavez's elections dealt was a blow Venezuela's bourgeois political parties haven't even started to recover from, but real social change has only come slowly as genuine popular organizations have grown in strength. I think this dynamic, and its possible outcomes, are still very important there and I intend to return to them later.