Lula's fall from grace

The global justice movement has fallen out of love with Lula. Only the right-wing of the World Social Forum still revere him; many are disillusioned by his record as Brazil's president and a growing number in his own country revile him. Whereas he was man of the moment when he was lauded at the second WSF in Brazil in 2003, just after he won the presidential election, now many in the anti-capitalist movement identify with those in the trade unions and the impatient landless peasants' movement, the MST - in their fight against Lula's government.

His party - the Workers' Party (PT) - which he founded in 1980 and still leads has been rocked by crisis as a result of the right wing course taken by Lula's government. PT members of Congress have been expelled for defying Lula' reactionary attack on pensions, which in turn precipitated a significant split from the PT and the formation of a new, rival, party.

The PT has gone from a 300 member propaganda group under a military dictatorship when it was formed in 1980 to today's ruling party of about 600,000 members in a bourgeois democracy.

When it was founded the PT brought together a group of diverse activists: key leaders and rank and file activists of the new trade union federation - the CUT; members of the anti-dictatorship committees; and Catholic grass roots radicals. They were united however in seeking to build a party that was independent of the existing bosses and landlord parties; in short, a party of the workers and poor.

One early PT document summarised the mixture of influences and ideologies that were built into the foundations of PT:

"We are in fact a synthesis of libertarian cultures, united in our diversity. Different currents of democratic and revolutionary thought - Social Christianity, various Marxisms, non-Marxist socialisms,..

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