Lula is Brazil’s leading trade unionist and head of its newest political party. He talks at length and discursively about the search and the need for “a just and egalitarian society” in Brazil .
Then, as he prepares to go, he suddenly unbuttons his shirt, sticks out his ample chest and shows the stencilling on his vest. “Opte,” it says, which means “I have chosen” or “I am committed.” The middle two letters, PT, are picked out in vivid red; they stand for the Partido dos Trabalhadores , the Workers’ Party, which got off the ground four years ago and now has millions of supporters, particularly in the industrial areas.
Lula, who was in London earlier this week, shows off his vest partly to emphasise that the party now has substance. Only a few years ago, to have worn such a vest publicly in Brazil, which has been ruled by the generals since the early 1980s, would have been enough to provoke arrest. Then, they said it would be impossible to organise self-respecting industrial action and inconceivable to start a party for the workers with a truly national base. Lula has confounded the sceptics; massive and prolonged strikes, though technically illegal, are now part of the Brazilian scene, and the Workers’ Party is too big to ignore.
He was born Luis Ignacio da Silva 39 years ago in the poorest part of the country, the north-east, and he is now appalled by the deprivation which still pervades that area. He became a lathe operator, and, working in São Paulo , was moved to take up the workers’ cause. He has read no Marx, he says, and does not feel the need for labels or slogans. He has never been to Moscow and gets no funds from the Russian. He insists, only half-joking, that he would love a quiet life.
But he talks scathingly and sceptically of the process next January by which an electoral college of nearly 700 will choose the country’s first civilian ruler for two decades. The generals may have authorised abertura, a gradual opening up towards democracy, but this time the workers are spectators rather than participants. The party demands direct elections.
Ostensibly the contest is between the right’s Paulo Maluf, who says he would run the country “like a business,” and the “comfortably left” Tancredo Neves , who is 74 and conciliatory rather than radical with a record of coexisting with even the most repressive military regimes.
Tancredo seems at this stage the likely winner, and the Workers’ Party’s contempt for the non-democratic process by which he will be chosen will become clear in a networked television programme the night before the college meets. “Tancredo,” says Lula, “is presented as St George about to slay the dragon. But things will not change. There will be no break With the IMF; no attempt to try or even investigate people for corruption in high places; no policy for land reform – and without these there can be no tackling of the country’s fundamental problems.”
Even so, he insists that next year “the struggle” will move to a decisive phase. Policy-moulding meetings are now being held throughout the country and the party’s national conference will be held 10 days before the new president is named. This conference will endorse a programme aimed at wholesale agrarian reform, freedom to organise trade unions and to strike, new wage agreements procedures, a shorter working week and more jobs, and so on. The country is one of enormous wealth – in relatively few hands – but basic needs remain unmet.
For millions of Brazilians the need is for jobs, he says, even for basic food, before it is for revolution. “We have to sow the seeds now if we want to reap a harvest in 10 or 15 years.”
The Catholic church remains an important ally. It has done much to raise political consciousness though, as Lula underlines angrily, it is under attack from the government and even from the Vatican as a result. “Very little can happen,” he says, “without the participation of the progressive wing of the church.”
