2002
For two decades—more or less since the Falklands War, and the end of the military dictatorships that had become an international byword for counter-revolutionary ferocity—South America has been largely forgotten by world politics. Recycled democratization, debt and dependency offered few conflicts and yielded no consequences to compare with dramas in Eastern Europe or Russia, the Middle or Far East, even domestic convulsions in North America itself. The days of the Cuban missile crisis might have belonged to another century. Today, there are once again tremors in this legendary margin of the larger arena. At one end of the continent, Argentina has seen a social breakdown that is neo-liberalism’s version of the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union, amid the largest sovereign default in history. At the other, Venezuela teeters day by day on the brink of civil war. Till yesterday, these were the two richest societies of the region. In between, American gunships swarm over Colombia as guerrillas shell the Presidential Palace; exasperated Indian populations loft a radical colonel to power in Ecuador, where the dollar—thousands of miles from Washington—is now the official currency, and have come close to electing one of their own, a militant grower of coca (the other currency of the area), to the presidency in Bolivia. Under weak rulers, Peru and Paraguay are seething with discontent. Everywhere, economic crisis is biting hard.
In this landscape, the sweeping electoral victory in Brazil of a burly former metal-worker, from a family of twenty-two in the backlands, missing a little finger in an industrial accident, ungrammatical in speech and untutored in government, is the loudest rumble of thunder to date. With a population now approaching 180 million, more than the rest of the continent combined, Brazil towers over its neighbours, but has never historically led them. Whether this might change under Lula is one of the many uncertainties his capture of the presidency raises. Within the country itself, the nature of his triumph poses other enigmas. What kind of verdict does it represent, in the first instance, on the tenure of Fernando Henrique Cardoso, whose eight years in office end next January? Lula campaigned strongly against his record, and even the candidate of his own party avoided overly compromising mention of him. Yet opinion polls suggest Cardoso’s standing as an individual has held up well, and there is no doubt that many Brazilians—principally, but not exclusively, from the middle classes—believe that he has been their most enlightened ruler to date.
Defenders of the outgoing president can point to a series of achievements, which—albeit exaggerated in official apologias—are real enough. Hyper-inflation was broken at the beginning of his rule, unambiguously benefiting the worst-off layers of the population. Illiteracy was reduced; infant mortality fell; there was some redistribution of land. If none of these advances was very spectacular—Brazil lags far behind even Mexico on the first and third, not to speak of Argentina or Chile on the second—the social ledger is not entirely bare. Nor, for that matter, is the administrative. The state apparatus has in certain respects undergone a genuine modernization, making it less opaque and more efficient. Levels of corruption, though still high, have fallen. Statistical information is somewhat more reliable, budgetary controls are tighter, regional pork-barrels are fewer. These are processes that have eroded the archaic oligarchies of the North-East, forces that helped Cardoso to power, but have been weakened under him: perhaps the most important long-run change of the period.
But if it is a mistake to dismiss such gains, they remain modest compared with the scale of the damage inflicted by the government’s macro-economic policies. The defining character of the Cardoso presidency has been a neo-liberalism ‘lite’, as Brazilians—pioneers of nicotine images of politics—would say. In other words, the kind that predominated throughout the developed capitalist world in the nineties, when doctrines of the Third Way and the New Centre—Clinton, Blair, Schroeder—ostensibly distanced themselves from the harder versions of neo-liberalism pioneered by Reagan and Thatcher in the eighties, while in practice continuing, indeed often accentuating, the original programme, but now accompanied by secondary social concessions and a more emollient rhetoric. Throughout this period the fundamental dynamic of neo-liberalism has persisted, unabated: its two core principles—deregulation of markets and privatization of services (or industries, where still public)—setting the parameters of economic correctness. In the United States, the brackish aftertaste of Clinton’s White House made a sufficient number of voters too queasy to return Gore, but the real legacy of his rule was the striking down of Glass-Steagall, and the Bubble Economy that burst in the wake of his exit: Enron, Tyco and WorldCom were its parting signatures.
In underdeveloped conditions, the sequence was necessarily different. Convinced that Brazil could not finance growth from domestic savings, and that its public enterprises fostered inefficiency and corruption, Cardoso overvalued the currency, put the state sector on the auction block and threw the economy open—gambling on imports to hold down inflation, and foreign investment to modernize infrastructure and industry. Brazil is a huge country, with a large internal market and abundant resources. Overseas capital duly flowed in—$150 billion by the end of his mandate. But it did little or nothing to dynamize the Brazilian economy, whose rates of investment remained sickly throughout Cardoso’s rule. Attracted mainly by cheap assets and sky-high interest rates, foreign operators snapped up public enterprises, acquired local firms and—above all—bought state bonds. Trade deficits soared, interest rates were raised even further to prop up the currency, and debt levels became hopelessly vulnerable to loss of confidence, triggering enormous outflows whenever there was turbulence in international financial markets—Mexico in 1995, East Asia in 1997, Russia in 1998, Argentina in 2001—and an inevitable collapse of the exchange rate. Repeated IMF bail-outs merely deepened the pit of debt into which the country was being driven. When Cardoso came to power, the trade balance was in surplus, and public debt some 28 per cent of GDP; by the end of this year, it had doubled to 56 per cent, most of it held on short-term maturities. Under his presidency, per capita growth rate has been a miserable one per cent a year. The results of the Brazilian variant of neo-liberalism are plain for all to see: deepening stagnation, falling real wages, unprecedented unemployment, and a staggering debt burden. The regime stands condemned on its own terms. The government’s original achievement—monetary stabilization—is in ruins: the currency is worth a quarter of its value at the outset of the Plano Real, interest rates are highest in the world, and the country is staring a moratorium in the face. Violent crime haunts the big cities as never before. Inequality remains virtually the worst anywhere. Dependency—in every deleterious sense—is incomparably deeper than it was when Cardoso, in his now distant past as a sociologist, once proposed a critical theory of it.
The logic of a neo-liberal model in the periphery of world capitalism puts any country that adopts it at the mercy of unpredictable movements in the financial markets of the centre, so Cardoso’s misadventures were in large measure the chronicle of a fiasco foretold. But this was also a timorous and incompetent regime. The exchange rate was unsustainable from the start, overvalued for demagogic effect, and no thought was given even to the modest degree of capital controls that a dependent neo-liberalism still allows, which protected the Chilean economy from the ravages that Brazil was to suffer. More generally, of course, the whole notion that the key to successful attraction of foreign capital was deregulation and privatization à l’outrance was naive and provincial. In the same years that Cardoso was leading Brazil into its present blind alley, China was attracting foreign investment on a scale that dwarfed the hot money in Brazil, while maintaining tight capital controls and a non-convertible currency, to achieve the highest rates of GNP growth in the world. There is no shortage of acute problems, not to speak of inequalities and injustices, in China today. But the contrast between vigorous development and crippled dependency could not be starker.
Why did Fernando Henrique cling to a plainly calamitous path so long, when its logic was already clear in the first exchange-rate crisis in the spring of 1995? One explanation would point to the political pact with the old order—the landowners of the North-East, the bankers and media magnates of São Paulo and Rio—that brought him to power. The maxim of his strategy to win the presidency was pas d’ennemis à droite. Today, though he himself continues to speak otherwise, his admirers abroad—as any issue of The Economist reveals—do not hesitate to describe Cardoso’s rule as a Centre-Right regime. In this interpretation, a distinguished statesman and intellectual of the Left became a captive of conservative alliances from which he could never free himself. Such a view, however, misconstrues the traditional oligarchies of the country, which have never been doctrinally inflexible—their instincts are utterly pragmatic or ‘physiological’, as the Brazilians put it—and often stood to lose from too strong doses of deregulation. A better answer probably lies in Cardoso’s relationship to his finance minister, Pedro Malan, and through him to the IMF and the US in a wider sense.
The psychological dependence of a ruler on a technician, in the decisive area of contemporary government, has become an increasingly common pattern in this period. Next door, the relationship between Carlos Menem and Domingo Cavallo offered an even more striking example. The two pairs, Brazilian and Argentinian, were very different as human beings. Cavallo had a demonic side—also in his boldness and energy—that Malan, a quiet mediocrity, entirely lacks. Menem, completely ignorant of economics, allowed Cavallo to install the ultimate folly of a currency board, guaranteeing parity of the peso to the dollar. But he had reason to fear him as a potential rival, and in due course they parted company. Cardoso, on the other hand, would probably have liked Malan to succeed him. Infinitely better prepared than Menem, he still remained by formation a sociologist, whose sense of disciplines no doubt inclined him to defer to a professional economist. The original stabilization of 1994 was the work of Malan and his team, and Cardoso owed everything to it. That moral debt made it difficult for him to jettison Malan along with Gustavo Franco, the brash novice he had installed as head of the Central Bank, when politically speaking, he should, in his own interest, have done so. When the inflated exchange rate of the Plano Real finally buckled, Franco was dropped. But Malan stayed, and Brazil’s fuite en avant into the tunnel of debt rattled on.
In Cardoso’s inability to separate himself from his chamberlain, there was a further and ultimately more decisive factor. Malan, an intimate of the IMF, enjoyed American confidence. These were the years in which Stanley Fischer, acting as itinerant bagman for Rubin and Summers, would disburse stand-by credits and loans from the IMF in sovereign disregard of its statutes, according to the political value of incumbent regimes around the world to Washington. The two chief beneficiaries of his largesse were Russia and Brazil, countries large and strategic enough to warrant special favours for rulers in them congenial to US interests, no matter how deficient their economic performance. Yeltsin and Cardoso were both rescued from electoral difficulties by timely injections of cash, since Washington wished to keep them in power. In Moscow, the guarantor of these transactions was Anatoly Chubais. In Brasília it was Malan. So long as he remained in office, Cardoso could be sure of exceptional treatment by the Fund and the Treasury.
This was a tie that in any case went with the grain. For Fernando Henrique, the United States was now the central point of external reference, in every sense. Originally, his culture—he was after all a leading Marxist intellectual in the sixties—had been much more European than American, and as late as the eighties he toyed with self-comparisons to Spanish social-democracy. But in the years of exile and return, there was a significant change. It was US foundations that made possible the research centre he set up in 1969, on coming back to Brazil, and when he entered the political arena, he made no secret of his belief that what Brazil needed was an equivalent of the Democratic Party, the makings of which he saw in the broad oppositional front to the dictatorship of those years, the MDB. By the time he was president, a decade and a half later, the power of the United States in the world had increased enormously, victory in the Cold War creating global hegemony of a kind never seen before.
Ideologically, Fernando Henrique had adapted to this ascendancy well before he entered the Palácio do Planalto. Sporadic friction over lesser tariffs or patents aside, matter for commercial attachés, the result was a more or less complete alignment with Washington on all major international issues. In effect, Brazil had virtually no foreign policy worth speaking of. Historically, this was scarcely a novelty. The military regime of the sixties and seventies, which possessed some sense of geopolitics, and pursued a line in Africa at sharp variance with the United States, was in this respect an exception. Cardoso came to power promising that Brazil would play a role in the world commensurate with the size of its new-found democracy. But in office he could have been a ruler of Honduras, unable to summon up the courage for so much as a ceremonial visit to Havana, where even Aznar or Carter found their way. His contemporary Guido di Tella, Argentina’s foreign minister under Menem, a scholar of no less charm and distinction, once publicly described his country’s foreign policy with the terse words: ‘We have carnal relations with the United States. The rest of the world doesn’t count’. Cardoso was incapable of such Hispanic tranchant—Portuguese is a more edulcorating idiom—but his diplomatic practice was the same. The principal difference was in rhetorical pretension. Abroad, he will be remembered mainly for those fatuous gatherings in New York, Florence and Berlin, solemnly discussing the Third Way, at which Clinton and Blair conferred with companions and underlings, to mounting derision even among media well-disposed to them. The comical windbaggery of these occasions did more to discredit Cardoso than he can have imagined: for someone of his past, they were the intellectual equivalent of Gorbachev’s advertising of pizzas on TV.
Within Brazil, of course, such matters have been of little moment. There, Cardoso continues to be widely respected for another side of his tenure. In the eyes of admirers, his greatest civilizing achievement has been the consolidation of Brazilian democracy. Courteous to opponents, constitutional in conduct, Fernando Henrique has presided—it is argued—over a nation that has become more mature in its politics, and stable in its attachment to values of liberty and civility. The peaceful transfer of power to Lula due to take place in January, after an election cleansed of calumny or violence, will set the seal on his most enduring legacy to the country. A normal democratic life has finally taken root in soil long poisoned by Brazil’s inheritance of racial slavery, rural oligarchy, populist demagogy and—last but not least—military tyranny.
This now standard defence of the Cardoso years reveals more about Brazilian identity than about democracy. Empires tend to give peoples who have enjoyed them a markedly self-absorbed, provincial outlook: a fate Brazilians have no more been able to escape than Britons or Americans. For the fact—obvious enough in any comparative perspective—is that the local preservation of democracy is no particular merit of Fernando Henrique, since it was never seriously threatened after the generals withdrew from power, and far from being a remarkable national feat, is a regional banality. All the other Latin American societies—Argentina, Chile, Uruguay—that underwent military dictatorships in the sixties and seventies have achieved as much, under colourless, or conservative, or even corrupt and autocratic rulers. From Aylwin to Frei to Lagos, from Sanguinetti to Lacalle to Batlle—no big deal. Even Menem, for whom it would be difficult to imagine a less democratic temperament, handed over power to de la Rua just as routinely as Cardoso will do to Lula in January.
Many Brazilians still find it difficult to remember their neighbours. Reminded of such common experiences, however, loyalists will concede that formally speaking, constitutional legality has been respected throughout the Southern Cone, and in that sense Cardoso’s rule may seem nothing special. But substantively, the quality of Brazilian democracy—so the reply goes—has vastly improved during his presidency. Compared with the chaotic, turbulent years under Sarney, Collor and Itamar, his government has been a model of rational conduct and orderly dialogue, accustoming Brazilians to new norms of political decency and reliability, from which all interlocutors have benefited. Within a decade this is a striking accomplishment, which has done a great deal to civilize Brazilian society.
How is this claim to be judged? There is no doubt that Brazilian politics became calmer and more predictable under Cardoso, nor that the conventions of the New Republic, whose charter dates from 1988, became steadily more anchored in custom and habit. To that extent, it could even be said that not monetary but political stabilization was the real trademark of the presidency, the second plainly outlasting the downfall of the first. On the other hand, a glance at the statistics or stories of steadily escalating crime in the press is enough to indicate the limits of the new civility. While urbanities are swapped in the cupulas of power, violence rages as never before on the beaches and streets. A week before the second round of the presidential polls this October, the Jornal do Brasil bannered its Monday edition: ‘Shootouts in Restaurant, Bus, School—8 Dead. A Normal Day in Rio’. In a single morning, sub-machine guns were blasting at the corner of the Avenida Atlantica in tourist Copacabana, in petty-bourgeois Niteroi across the bay and in the slums of the Zona Norte. Anglo-American viewers will soon be able to get a sense of such nightmares, with the release of the movie City of God, based on Paulo Lins’s novel. They are unlikely to think the country is being civilized.
But it is not just the contrast between elite arrangements and popular misery that makes talk of a transformation of Brazilian political mores seem one-sided. Something more ideologically pointed is also at stake. For when people speak of the civilizing effect of Cardoso’s government, what they are often actually referring to was its ability to tamp down the conflictual potential of Brazilian democracy, by setting the parameters of a consensus in which all serious dissent is disqualified in advance as outlandish and anachronistic: the local version of la pensée unique. Naturally, within this conformist corral, in which neo-liberal platitudes are taken as read, exchanges are well-mannered. But if we look at the institutional structures of power, a different picture emerges. In Brazil, parties are often little more than labels of pecuniary convenience, alliances for dubious ends between the most incongruous partners a matter of course, and deputies transfer allegiances as frequently as football players. Before, and even for a short while after, he became president, Fernando Henrique spoke of the urgent need for political reform, to render the party system more principled and coherent as the first condition of improving democratic life in Brazil.
At the end of eight years, what is the balance-sheet? There has been no change of any kind. In practice, Cardoso preferred to maintain the existing amorphous promiscuity, since it afforded such scope for his own outstanding skills in corridor negotiation and congressional manoeuvre. The ‘reform’ he forced through instead was the exact opposite: changing the Constitution to permit his own re-election as president. Politically speaking, this was certainly the worst single act of his rule, which will have the longest effects. It places him alongside Fujimori and Menem, whose example he imitated, as so many self-important egoists who degraded the legal traditions and democratic prospects of their countries. Latin America has always suffered from the bane of over-powerful presidentialism—historically, the worst single import from the United States, aggravated by the lack of Northern checks and balances, and seedbed of every kind of demagogy and autocracy. But at least the liberal oligarchs of the nineteenth century, and their successors in the twentieth, typically saw the sense of single-term limits. In Brazil, even the military dictatorship of the sixties and seventies did not tamper with this rule, showing sufficient collective self-discipline to pass the baton from one officer to another every five years.
There was no compelling reason, other than vainglory, for Cardoso to insist on re-election. Malan or Serra, his minister of health, could perfectly well have continued his regime in 1998, when they would have been elected without difficulty. In ramming through such a fundamental change, for such trivial motives, Fernando Henrique dealt a triple blow to Brazilian democracy. Firstly, by resorting to corruption to attain his ends—deputies from the depths of the Amazonian jungle were purchased to secure the necessary legislative majority—later waved away by their beneficiary with the immortal words: ‘Someone may have sold their vote, the government didn’t buy it.’1 Secondly, by reinforcing the powers of an executive that already enjoys vast facilities of patronage and manipulation, and intensifying the personalization of politics, in the most deteriorated sense, around it. Finally, and perhaps most fatally, by the hypocrisy with which Cardoso orchestrated the campaign for his continuism—telling the nation, again and again, that he had nothing to do with the spontaneous desire that had arisen within Congress to permit a second term, a matter about which he was entirely neutral. Lying as brazen as this is an act of contempt, showing all too clearly the cynical realities behind the façade of an ‘improved’ Brazilian democracy.
If there was a single turning-point in Cardoso’s rule, it was here. To see the political decay to which it has contributed, one only had to glance at the commercials with which every presidential candidate saw fit to deluge the nation this autumn. In the end, re-election rebounded against Fernando Henrique himself. If he had stepped down in 1998, his performance—though its underlying logic was already plain enough—would have looked far better than it does in 2002. By clinging to power, he has ensured that he will be remembered for his economic myopia. In January 2003 he will exit in Mexican style—like López Portillo or Carlos Salinas, just able to defer the reckoning for his policies till he is out of office, but unlikely to be able to protect his reputation from what ensues. Unlike them, he never took financial advantage of his position. The treasury was not looted. But nor, unlike them, did he give the nation any passing period of growth either.
This is not to say that history will judge him a failure. It is too early for such a verdict, since his very economic mismanagement could paradoxically engender a long-term political success. For the legacy of debt he has left will lay such constraints on his successor that he has good reason to hope, as he proclaims, that his policies will live on after him, in the conduct of the new government. Nor is this the only way he has locked in those who will follow him. The ideological grip of the brand of conventional wisdom he came to represent remains, if not quite intact, still largely dominant in Brazil today, and with it the personalization of power he intensified. So, just as Thatcher can hail Blair as her most durable achievement—the transformation of the opposition into an updated version of her own rule—so Cardoso could still be able to congratulate himself that, after all, he had rendered a neo-liberal order in Brazil irreversible for some time to come.
On the face of it, Lula would seem an improbable candidate for the role that Fernando Henrique has so clearly cast him in. But Latin America abounds with examples of politicians or parties winning elections on platforms fiercely opposed to neo-liberalism, who once in power proceeded to implement neo-liberal policies, not infrequently more drastically than those they denounced for doing so in the first place. In Venezuela, Carlos Andrés Pérez was the first to follow this parabola, campaigning passionately against foreign debt and austerity, and then imposing an IMF-dictated package so savage it detonated the weeks of deadly rioting—the Caracazo of 1989—in a society then substantially richer per capita than Brazil today. In the same year, Fujimori beat Mario Vargas Llosa in Peru, denouncing the writer’s repressive financial orthodoxy with a vehemence far exceeding any PT discourse today, and then became the architect of a particularly corrupt and cruel version of it. In Argentina, Menem’s trajectory was essentially the same.
None of these figures situated themselves exactly on the Left, but in Europe we have seen the same cycle played out between Left and Right alike. France is the most eloquent case. Chirac came to power in 1995, denouncing la pensée unique—it was he who virtually patented the term—of the Mitterrand years. Once elected, his government promptly tried to impose classic neo-liberal reforms, which set off the great strikes of 1996, and lost him the elections of 1998, won by Jospin promising to do the opposite. Four years later, Jospin had privatized more than all previous governments put together, and the Socialist Party was in turn rejected at the polls this spring. Whatever the voters wanted in France, governments of either colour always did much the same. Time and again, promises were so much political confetti.
To note these precedents is not to say that Brazil is doomed to repeat the same cycle. Lula’s capture of the presidency marks potentially a far deeper, and more hopeful, political change than any rotation of office in France. The symbolism of a former shoeshine-boy and street-vendor achieving supreme power in the most unequal major society on earth speaks for itself. Although other Brazilian presidents have been of comparatively humble origins, they all made their way to the top through further—military or civilian—education. Lula, a trade-union leader in his twenties, remains culturally a worker from a poor rural family, raised in the industrial belt round Sāo Paulo, whose Portuguese is imperfect, and formal learning minimal. In private, with a nice touch of irony, he has remarked: ‘Bush and I must be the two most ignorant presidents in the world’. Like his Northern counterpart, he has a streak of laziness, alongside a by now considerable acquired shrewdness. Across successive presidential campaigns, he has honed a macho charm capable of seducing middle-class audiences and disarming opponents, as well as electrifying popular masses. To see him at the microphone in the Canecão, a traditional music-hall in Botafogo, in the last days of the campaign, surrounded by composers, singers, actresses, writers—labour wooing culture—explaining to the crowd that he had been to Rio for political meetings many times, but could never wander barefoot on the sand of its beaches like any other citizen, was to watch a theatrical performance as professional as any in that setting.
All this can encourage myth-making. Brazilian culture is sentimental as well as cynical—the two, as one would expect, going together—and the local media are currently in biographical over-drive, as if social origins were a safe guide to political conduct. The example of Wałesa should be warning enough against excesses in this department. That said, it remains the case that Lula embodies a life-experience of popular hardship and a record of social struggle from below that no other ruler in the world approaches. His bond with the poor sets him apart. This is his primary constituency, and he will care how they rate him in power. Behind him, moreover, is the only new mass party to have been created out of the labour movement since the Second World War—an organization that in numbers, influence, and relative cohesion has no equal in Latin America. The PT, which currently claims some 300,000 members, though criteria are not strict, is now, after administering a string of Brazil’s largest cities—São Paulo, Belém, Recife, Brasília, Porto Alegre—a much more moderate organization than it was in the eighties. But it is still relatively free-form, without a fully centralized bureaucratic apparatus, and contains many militants who have not forgotten their radical past. Last but not least, there is the mass sentiment expressed in the presidential poll itself. The wretched of the Brazilian earth—those officially classified as ‘poor and indigent’ who make up nearly half the population—cast their votes for him in huge numbers. In the coastal cities of Rio and Salvador, with their black populations, Lula had landslide majorities: 79 and 89 per cent respectively. A climate of popular expectation surrounds Lula that no president of the New Republic has ever enjoyed at the outset of their mandate. Hope of relief from the misery of the last years will not vanish overnight.
On the other hand, against all such subjective build-up must be set the objective constraints of the situation in which president and party will now find themselves. First and foremost, of course, there is the landscape of economic wreckage left by Malan and Cardoso. Already before taking office, the PT leadership has strapped itself—in some cases, with well-nigh masochistic zest—into the Procrustean bed laid out by the IMF, a ‘primary surplus’ of 3.75 per cent of GDP, which will not only exclude any significant increase, but is likely to dictate a severe contraction of social spending, to win the confidence of foreign creditors and keep interest rates from climbing still higher.
At the same time, social mobilization remains depressed at levels far below those of the eighties—one of the effects of the Cardoso years, weakening the collective energies always needed to confront emergencies. Here the very scale of Lula’s victory at the polls is an ambiguous blessing. In the second round, he piled up 52 million votes, crushing Serra by 61 to 39 per cent. In part, this plebiscite was tribute to Lula’s own tireless criss-crossing of the country, to its remotest corners, which no other candidate attempted. But it was also the product of a saccharine public relations and propaganda campaign, orchestrated around the sickly watchword ‘Lula—Peace and Love’, and projected through television commercials of uninhibited effrontery, designed by a former key strategist of the business Right. Brazilian political advertisements are longer than American, allowing for more serious argument—but also for more flamboyantly manipulative kitsch. Lula’s outclassed Serra’s in every respect, not least the sums of money spent on them. Their signature gesture was the beckoning hand—of nubile nymphs, sports stars, average joes—inviting the viewer, to the rhythms of exuberant music, into bandwagon or bed, in the name of the motto. Once Lula had established a commanding lead in the opinion polls, the Globo empire—Brazil’s Murdoch—started to smile on him, and money poured into his campaign coffers from banks and firms, making him paradoxically by far the best-financed of all the candidates. Such support is not given free.
Then too, powerful though the presidency is, legislation must pass Congress. There the PT has become for the first time the largest party, but in a fragmented spectrum in which it commands less than a fifth of seats in the assembly. Lula’s national vote was double that of the party, which failed to gain the governorship of any important states. The imbalance between executive and legislative scores will be accentuated by the enhanced presidency, whose vast powers of patronage—some 20,000 posts are in its gift—anyway risk absorbing too many PT militants. For his electoral campaign, Lula adopted a paternalist textile millionaire, from a small Evangelical party, as his vice-presidential candidate, and picked up the endorsement of not a few disgruntled or opportunist oligarchs from the North-East. For a workable majority in Congress, he has already had to extend such alliances. The PT’s political manager, José Dirceu—former exile in Cuba, underground operative for a decade on his return to Brazil—will be in control of this front. But it would be naive to imagine much radical legislation speeding out of the new Chamber.
Beyond these liabilities, there is also the weight of cultural tradition that will bear on the agents of any renovation. Far more even than Italy, which gave the concept to the world, Brazil is par excellence the land of trasformismo—the capacity of the established order to embrace and invert forces of change, until they become indistinguishable from what they set out to oppose. The career of Fernando Henrique, former Marxist become a pillar of the Centre-Right, has been a typical expression of this culture, of which he is both imprint and instrument. Lula’s plebeian background is no bar to embrace by the establishment. Social hierarchy has always formed an easy connubium with affable informality in Brazil, and there is no reason to think that—without precautions—the backing of banks today could not become the neutering of an upstart tomorrow. The rhetorical conditions for such an outcome have already been prepared. Peace and love are, in advance, a vocabulary of ingestion and defeat. A cause can survive a slogan, but without better ones than this, objective pressures will crush subjective intentions soon enough.
But here, of course, programmes—as distinct from catchwords—become decisive. What does the incoming government propose to the country? Viewing its prospects statically, it would be difficult to avoid pessimism. In opposition, the PT has not been uncreative. The participatory budgets of Porto Alegre, where voters determine the distribution of spending in their wards, are an invention widely admired abroad. PT economists were the first to point out the logic of Malan’s neo-liberalism, and predict its fatal consequences. But overall, it is obvious that neither party nor president have any articulated alternative to the reigning orthodoxy, as their pre-electoral adherence to the directives of the IMF made clear. On the other hand, historically, actual policy innovations in Latin America have seldom followed preconceived schemes. Out of the great crisis that shook the continent in 1929, arose a set of pragmatic, intuitive responses—essentially, different forms of import-substituting populism: Getulismo in Brazil, Peronism in Argentina, the MNR in Bolivia—that were creative and effective in their time. The ECLA doctrines formulated by Raúl Prebisch that were later associated with them crystallized post facto, more than guiding the actors in advance. South America today faces, once again, a crisis of continental proportions. Why should not Brazil, or its neighbours, once more find a way out of its impasse in similar fashion—with ingenious ad hoc solutions?
The difference, of course, lies in the immeasurably greater degree of integration of these economies, societies and cultures in the global order of capital, commanded from the North. The material and ideological intermeshing of national agents and processes with international structures that penetrate and mould them has no comparison with the situation in the Depression, when Latin America was left largely to its own devices once Wall Street had crashed. To that extent, the programmatic requirements for breaking out of the present straitjacket appear much higher. But if the central economies themselves should go into a tail-spin—were the United States to enter the trajectory of Japan in the last decade—then, as the empire attended to its homelands, the possibilities of improvised invention in the periphery might be released once more.