The Alternative to Lulism Brazil needs a left opposition capable of resisting both Dilma Rousseff's impeachment and deepening austerity. The Drive for Impeachment (original) (raw)

Loveis dead, " say disillusioned Brazilian youth. They've lost faith in Brazil's Workers' Party (PT), in their former champion, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and in their government. The militancy of the country's socialist left is being put to the test this year. The essential issue is the difficulty of defending the independence of working-class interests facing two foes: the current incarnation of the PT and their mainstream allies, and the PT's political opponents, the Brazilian Social Democracy Party (PSDB) and its right-wing counterparts. Some sectors of the right-wing opposition, led by Eduardo Cunha, the president of the chamber of deputies, and Aécio Neves, the defeated 2014 PSDB presidential candidate, are rallying to impeach Dilma Rousseff, Brazil's president and the PT's leader. Behind them are the two million people, mostly members of the middle class, who took to the streets to protest last March. Contributing to the public's disillusionment with Rousseff is thePetrobras corruption scandal. In October 2014, Petrobras, the Brazilian state-run oil conglomerate, was found to be funneling money to political parties, including the PT. The scandal has severely shaken the public's confidence in Rousseff, who ran on a platform of eliminating corruption. Political stability in Brazil started to unravel in June 2013, a decade after the birth of Lulism. Lulism — under which economic prosperity strengthened the public's faith in government, and large, previously disorganized sectors of the working class gravitated toward the PT — is fading as the social pact it maintained between workers and the ruling class disintegrates. The elections and the 2014 World Cup temporarily relieved the government of public scrutiny; this year, however, social unrest aimed at the government seems nearly inevitable as people begin to feel the impacts of austerity. And neither of the clashing bourgeois political camps is willing to consider any solution to the country's economic woes but more austerity.