Fernando Haddad on Brazil’s Place in Global Capitalism

Before Lula was elected in 2022, we spent seven years out of power, which was a consequence of two factors. The first was a parliamentary coup against President Rousseff Dilma in 2016. Up to then, Latin America had a long history of violent military assaults on democratic institutions; but this coup was of a completely different order, since it took place entirely within democratic institutions, and its only objective was to remove the PT from power.

The second factor was the decision to bar Lula from running in the 2018 presidential election, which he certainly would have won, because of the “Operation Car Wash” allegations. This is a well-known story. Operation Car Wash began as an anti-corruption investigation but soon became a political weapon used to stop Lula from winning the presidency. So I ended up running as the presidential candidate instead. It was crucial for the PT to put up a fight in that election to show that we were still able to compete in the political arena. Even in defeat, we made it to the second round and won about 45 percent of the vote.

The Bolsonaro government was an utter disaster, and once Lula was exonerated he was finally allowed to run again in 2022. Yet it was very difficult to compete against the far right when they held state power and were willing to use every possible means to retain it. So we were compelled to form an alliance with Brazil’s democratic center right. Before Bolsonaro came onto the scene, our main electoral opponents were the PSDB (Brazilian Social Democracy Party), the center-right party that was central to the country’s democratization process.

Unlike Bolsonaro, the former PSDB president Fernando Henrique Cardoso was a very civil and cultured person with a basic commitment to democratic values. So we built an alliance with such forces that allowed us to defeat the far right and return to government.

As a result of forging that coalition, our present program has some elements that could be described as centrist, but at the same time its aim is to recover the social rights that had been suppressed by bolsonarismo: increasing the minimum wage, fighting hunger, protecting the autonomy of universities, guaranteeing freedom of expression, and so on. The current PT government is moving toward social demands that were not on the agenda of our previous ones, such as taxing the superrich to redistribute income.