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Unexpectedly, Brazilian President Ignacio da Silva (“Lula”) failed to achieve an overall
majority in the general elections of Oct. 1. He ended up with only
48.61 percent, well below the public opinion poll estimate of
his support.
The big bourgeois
press has been saying that corruption scandals cut more deeply
into his vote than expected. They have ignored the fact that
a left-wing challenger, Heloisa Helena, a
member of the Fourth International, the
international revolutionary organization with which Socialist
Action is aligned, scored almost 7 percent, gaining
6.5 million votes.
She is the former
head of the Senate fraction of the Partido
dos Trabaljadores, Lula’s party, which
was initially formed on the basis of an upsurge of trade-union
struggles in the 1980s. She was the most prominent opponent of the
PT president’s swing to the right after he came into office
and become the leader of a left split from the PT, the Party
of Freedom and Socialism (PSOL).
In
these elections, the PSOL was allied with the
United Socialist Workers Party (PSTU), which presents
itself as a revolutionary party and has considerable
strength in the trade-union movement.
In most of the races
for other federal and local posts, the PSOL got token votes,
except in the state of Rio de Janeiro, where it elected a federal deputy with 119,000
votes. In that state, Heloisa Helena got
17 percent of the vote.
Another aspect of
the vote that the bourgeois press did not analyze is the fact that
the PT vote was highest in the impoverished northeast. These are,
of course, the poorest states. But they are also politically the
most backward.
The PT organization
there is much newer than in its old base in the industrialized
south. In the south, the original areas of PT strength, the
population has experienced the PT in office and has apparently
been disappointed.
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