Governing Brazil

New Challenges for the Left

For more than a century, the left has been engaged in an extensive debate on how to govern capitalist states when it reaches power through electoral processes. Although leftist revolutionaries don’t have to confront this problem, reformers face a serious dilemma: how to sustain a leftist agenda of constructing social equality while, at the same time, creating the conditions for economic development and maintaining the stability of the capitalist system. Social democracy and the welfare state seemed to be a solution, but the levels of public spending required resulted in the worldwide fiscal crisis of the 1970s and the rebirth of right-wing classical liberalism. Since then, the reformist left has been unsuccessful in finding new alternatives. Electoral victories have become scarcer, and many have even argued that we are witnessing a decline of the left-right conflict, a positive movement that is taking us beyond the anachronistic political language we inherited from the nineteenth century.

I may be missing something, but I believe this is a false impression and that the ever-changing nature of the capitalist system has yet to render this language obsolete. Political events in different places around the world require us to reconsider the standard meanings of words such as left and right-but without stripping them of their core significance.

Brazil is one of these places. What is going on in contemporary Brazilian politics may shed light on what has happened to our political vocabulary in the past few decades and on the challenges the left faces in the near future. Even though no Brazilian presidential race ever received the kind of attention from the international media that the election of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva received, it is not only the political facts that deserve a closer look. The election of a leftist leader in one of the biggest economies of the world has deeper meanings, particularly if one looks at the government’s main policies over these first months.

The present combination of macroeconomic conservatism and social welfarism adopted by Lula and his government hardly constitutes a leftist agenda. Are we to jump to the conclusion, therefore, that they have abandoned the left in the name of pragmatism and realpolitik? Is Lula designing a traditional social democratic agenda, pushed to the right by the pressures of the financial community for fiscal and monetary conservatism? Neither of these seems an accurate description, especially when one places them in historical perspective.

In last year’s presidential elections, Lula, the leader of the most important leftist political party in the country, the Workers’ Party (PT), ran a campaign markedly different from those of his three previous presidential races. In 1989, after the end of the military dictatorship, Lula presented himself as a spokesman for the interests of the working class. Promising radical change...