Lula pulling a Putin?

[Blanquist]

(Reuters) - Brazil's ex-president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva said on Thursday he may run for president again in 2014 if he is needed to prevent the victory of the party that governed before his two-term 2003-2011 presidency.

"The only situation under which I'd be a candidate again is if she (current President Dilma Rousseff) doesn't want the job," Lula said on the O Ratinho, or "the Rat" TV show on the country's SBT network. "I will not permit a member of the PSDB to become president of Brasil again."

Lula, a former metalworker and union leader, was elected president in 2002 and took over the presidency from Fernando Henrique Cardoso on January 1, 2003. Cardoso is a member of the center-left Brazilian Social Democracy Party, or PSDB.

The interview on SBT, Lula said, was the first he's given since he left office 17 months ago.

Rousseff, a member of Lula's Workers' Party and his hand-picked successor, has been in office since January 1, 2011. She is Brazil's first female president.

Lula ran for president three times and lost, twice to Cardoso, before winning the 2002 elections. After serving two consecutive four-year terms, he stepped down on December 31, 2010.

Brazil's Constitution limits presidents to two consecutive four-year terms. After sitting out at least one term, a former two-term president can run for and become president again.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/06/01/us-brazil-lula-future-idUSBRE85005820120601

[Luís Henrique]

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/06/01/us-brazil-lula-future-idUSBRE85005820120601

I remember a right-winger co-worker who kept relentlessly repeating that Lula would change the constitution to be able to win a third term.

I kept rebuking him with the obvious "you know, I am a member of the party, there is absolutely no talk of anything similar, we will have another candidate"... which he evidently dismissed as part of our "secret strategy" to win a third term for Lula. Then Dilma was chosen as a candidate, so he stopped for a while... until she was diagnosed with cancer, which immediately became "proof" that Lula would have a third term, and had chosen Dilma as a candidate already knowing that she was ill and going to die, exactly to be able to stage a coup and earn a third term. When Dilma recovered, then the idea was that we had put up a weak candidate, in order to actually lose, so that Lula would make a comeback in 2014 as the only possibility to defeat Serra's reelection bid.

In the end, this madness was a good thing: they kept deluding themselves that our strategy involved some kind of constitutional coup, and that they would defeat it in the courts, so when they actually had to put up an electoral campaign they got lost in their habitual dilemma: should they campaign on the idea that Lula's government's policies are the worst ever, or on the idea that they are they just a copy of Cardoso's policies? And when they lost, they lost to the very candidate that they themselves had told the world was a "very weak candidate"... :rolleyes:

Seriously, the Brazilian right looks like those homophobes that cannot talk about anything else except homosexuality. It seems that deep down they actually love Lula in a nasty case of desperate, overwhelming self-destructive passion. :laugh:

And that article is exactly more of the same syndrome. Lula says,


The only situation under which I'd be a candidate again is if she (current President Dilma Rousseff) doesn't want the job

and this is read as proof that he wants a new term? Please. It means exactly that: if the only way to defeat the PSDB is his candidacy, then he won't rebuke the task. Else, he is going to do something else. And as the PSDB is increasingly absorbed in its absolute lack of anything similar to a program, plus its eternal internal strife between Serra and Aécio Neves, all the chances are that Lula is actually going to do something else.

And if the PSDB is center-left, as the article has it, then Lula is an anarcho-Bordigist. Of the radical wing, of course.

Luís Henrique

[Brosa Luxemburg]

And if the PSDB is center-left, as the article has it, then Lula is an anarcho-Bordigist. Of the radical wing, of course.

Luís Henrique

:confused: What?

[blake 3:17]

@Blanquist -- Lula pulls a Putin? What do you mean?


:confused: What?

The PSDB is a right centrist party. The PT has moved in neo-liberal directions in governance, but maintains a base in Brazil's radical social and labour movements.

Luis Henrique, what do you think of comparisons between the PT and the ANC?

[La Guaneña]

:confused: What?

The PSDB is more like Center-Right.


Luís, are you still a member of PT?

[Luís Henrique]

:confused: What?

The PSDB is solidly centre-right.

It may have been a left-of-centre bourgeois political party when it was created in 1988, but it changed quite quickly; in 1992 it was already divided on the issue of supporting or opposing Fernando Collor, and from 1995 on it has been nothing but a quite rightist party, systematically defending private property and privilege.

Luís Henrique

[Luís Henrique]

@Blanquist -- Lula pulls a Putin? What do you mean?

Well, things in Russia seem to be that Putin and Medvedev alternate as presidents of the Federation, with Putin having two terms to one of Medvedev. The Brazilian Constitution would allow to have it like that, to, with Lula being able to earn two more terms now, too. There is a huge difference, of course, in that Brazil doesn't have a prime minister, so half of the Putin-Medvedev arrangement - in which either is the prime minister while the other is the president, the real power residing on the position Putin holds - cannot be put in place.

What seems to be implied in such a statement, however, is that the growing authoritarianism of Putin's rule would somehow be mimicked by the evolution of things in Brazil. This is completely untrue atm, with the Brazilian opposition and press being completely free to do and say as they wish - going even to the point that the oppositionist press lies and slanders with very little consequence. Example being the rag magazine Veja, which knowingly participated in schemes to blackmail the government on behalf of Carlinhos Cachoeira's gambling mafia, and still circulates, even pretending, as always, to be stalwarts of morality.


The PSDB is a right centrist party. The PT has moved in neo-liberal directions in governance, but maintains a base in Brazil's radical social and labour movements.

I think the PT has moved to the right, and capitulated to bourgeois positions - but not that such positions are neoliberal. Rather they look like Keynesian-developmentist positions - which is one of the reasons that the worldwide crisis has, up to this moment, not hit Brazil with the same intensity it is burning Europe's periphery. Of course, the extent to which such line is going to resist once the crisis hits the country in earnest is still to be seen; it is quite possible that it will be replaced by a more orthodox monetarist approach - or that it will be unable to keep the Brazilian economy afloat, thus leading to an electoral disaster of the PT in 2014.


Luis Henrique, what do you think of comparisons between the PT and the ANC?

I don't know exactly what such comparisons would be; the ANC and the PT have quite different histories, one being a quite wide political front faced with an exceptional situation - that of apartheid - that did not ever resemble anything in Brazil, and the other being a more or less classical social-democratic party, transitioning from quite radical workerist positions in the 1980's to more common place reformism nowadays.

Luís Henrique

[Luís Henrique]

Luís, are you still a member of PT?

Yes, I see no reason to change atm, the PT still being the main working class' party in Brazil.

Luís Henrique

[black magick hustla]

Yes, I see no reason to change atm, the PT still being the main working class' party in Brazil.

Luís Henrique

What is your definition of a "working class party"? I am not being facetious, I am just curious.

[Luís Henrique]

What is your definition of a "working class party"? I am not being facetious, I am just curious.

A party that is recognised by the working class in general, and by the organised working class in particular, as its own party.

What would be your definition of a working class party, if you believe that such a thing can exist?

Luís Henrique

[black magick hustla]

A party that is recognised by the working class in general, and by the organised working class in particular, as its own party.

What would be your definition of a working class party, if you believe that such a thing can exist?

Luís Henrique

A lot of "mainstream bourgeois" parties are like that though. in Mexico, there was the PRI, for most of its lifetime (which consolidated power through popular "grassroot" institutions like peasant orgs and labor unions) etc. In Europe, the biggest parties were like that, etc.

I guess you can make an argument that certain parties with certain histories are "sociologically" working class in terms of outlooks and origins. I remember having a discussion in some pub with some skinhead girl that chastized my soccer loyalties because they didn't come from "working class FCs". I can see why you would consider parties like PT "working class" then.
I don't want to pretend the "ideological line" of a party is what makes a party working class. I think a lot of insignificant sects imply they have a "working class/proletarian" perspective by using such a dumb standard.

I just don't think that being a communist is about taking the side of what seems like "sociologically" working class. A good example is a lot of the anti-immigration sentiments and latent racism in the left and labor movement of the UK. A lot of this views are pretty much sociologically working class - in fact, I remember someone in this forum of accusing me of being a "middle class student" (which I certainly am, no shame in that) for taking a very strong and no compromise attitude about open borders. There might be some truth in that, but I don't think it really matters, because I don't think communism is workerism.

Anyway, my point in here is that, is there any usefulness in entering this "sociologically working class" parties? Obviously you think there is some use, otherwise you wouldn't be member of one. I don't think there is, though.

[Die Neue Zeit]

A party that is recognised by the working class in general, and by the organised working class in particular, as its own party.

What would be your definition of a working class party, if you believe that such a thing can exist?

Luís Henrique

Why are you defending the Anglo-Saxon / Labourite model over the Continental one, with respect to reformist workers parties?

[Luís Henrique]

Why are you defending the Anglo-Saxon / Labourite model over the Continental one, with respect to reformist workers parties?

I don't recognise the distinction.

Luís Henrique

[Die Neue Zeit]

I don't recognise the distinction.

Luís Henrique

One bases itself exclusive as the "political arm of the trade union movement" or whatever, while the other has a broader base within the working class. (http://www.revleft.com/vb/lesser-two-evils-t172262/index.html)

[Luís Henrique]

One bases itself exclusive as the "political arm of the trade union movement" or whatever, while the other has a broader base within the working class. (http://www.revleft.com/vb/lesser-two-evils-t172262/index.html)

I don't think my definition of a working class party excludes either. Nor I think that the PT is anything even close to a mere political arm of the trade union movement.

Luís Henrique