Brazil after Lula

Last week’s resignation from the Brazilian Workers party (PT) by Marina Silva, the country’s former environment minister, is only the most high profile of the blows that President Lula’s administration has just suffered.

Silva resigned from the government itself last May after a series of disagreements with other ministers, including Lula’s chief of staff and chosen successor, Dilma Rousseff. Quitting the party she has belonged to for more than 30 years clears the way for her candidacy in next year’s presidential elections for the Greens. She is extremely unlikely to win this but she could fatally weaken Rousseff’s own presidential bid.

Rousseff has been gaining in the polls in recent months but still lags behind two potential candidates from PT’s main rival the Brazilian Social Democratic Party (PSDB): José Serra, the current governor of São Paulo, and Aécio Neves, the governor of Minas Gerais.

Lula is constitutionally required to step down after two terms in office, and PT is hoping that enough of his phenomenal personal popularity will rub off on Rousseff – who cuts a rather dour figure despite her history as a former guerrilla and political prisoner. He has called her the “mother” of his economic development programme and accompanies her constantly at meetings across the country. The Brazilian economy bounced out of recession fast and Lula’s international stature is growing, so the strategy might work, but it has hit a number of bumps in the road in recent weeks.

The biggest of these comes in the shape of the current president of the senate and former president of Brazil, José Sarney, who has been the target of repeated allegations of corruption, cronyism and family nepotism. Sarney, who the Economist recently described as a dinosaur, sums up what many Brazilians think is worst about their country’s politicians. But his centrist Brazilian Democratic Movement party (PMDB) is a key component of the political alliance PT needs for its presidential campaign.

Lula has exhorted his party to put the equivalent of a clothes peg on its nose and support Sarney. He is also pressing PT to make local pacts with PMDB, which often requires them to stand down their own candidates in places where they have a shot at winning seats. Much of the support that PT historically enjoyed was because of its reputation as a “clean hands” party, so the strategy is causing widespread internal unease.

Last week matters came to a head in a Senate vote when PT’s parliamentary leader threatened to quit if his party’s representatives on a committee were forced to back Sarney, then didn’t when they did. Silva was one of a number of people who resigned from the party in the aftermath of this debacle and many regard it as the worst split that PT has suffered since the mensalão corruption crisis of its first term.

Lula survived that incident and came back to win a second term, convincingly seeing off both the PSDB challenger and two former PT dissidents – from the party’s middle-class intellectual wing – who ran against him. However, Silva represents a deeper and more emotional link with PT’s roots. Born in an impoverished community of rubber tappers in the remote Amazon state, she was orphaned at 16 and was illiterate until her early teens. She joined PT along with Chico Mendes, the murdered trade unionist and environmental activist who is still venerated as a virtual saint within the party. She became Brazil’s youngest ever female senator and won a string of international awards for her defence of the environment and its people. An evangelical Protestant who holds fundamentalist views on a number of social issues, she will nevertheless be a difficult candidate for PT to attack during the election and will pick up a large protest vote from many of its natural supporters.

In the meantime, Rousseff’s candidacy has been damaged by an as yet unproved allegation that she ordered a public employee to help cover up corruption allegations in the Sarney case. Her recent battle with cancer has won her public sympathy, but also raised concerns about whether she is strong enough for an arduous campaign – and the job itself. This week rumours began circulating that PT was considering a possible alternative candidate, Antonio Palocci, a former finance minister, who was forced to resign around the time of the mensalao scandal. Palocci is hoping to soon be officially cleared of any wrongdoing. He also has a base of support in São Paulo, Brazil’s largest state and the heartland of PSDB’s Jose Serra. However, the fact that no one has yet been convicted in relation to this scandal – the biggest in Brazilian political history – makes its legacy potent and swapping candidates this late into the race could prove problematic.

PT’s basic difficulty is that the party has always been weaker than its charismatic leader. Lula’s decision not to push for a constitutional amendment to allow him to run for another term, as has happened elsewhere in Latin America recently, has undoubtedly strengthened Brazil’s still fledgling democracy. But the loss of Silva, who was its best known figure internationally after Lula himself, makes it even harder for the party to define what it still stands for.