Brazil Elects Lula in a Landslide
Nation's First Vote for Leftist Could Set Back Plan for Hemispheric
Free-Trade Zone
By Scott Wilson
SAO PAULO, Brazil, Oct. 27 -- Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, a former union
leader who never attended college, won a landslide victory today in a Brazilian
presidential election that reflected the disenchantment sweeping much
of Latin America after a decade of free-market reforms that have failed
to deliver promised
prosperity.
Lula, as the gray-bearded socialist is known, defeated his centrist
opponent, Jose Serra, a former government minister, by a huge margin. With
95 percent of the
vote counted, Lula had 61.5 percent, compared with 38.5 percent for
Serra, after a day when millions of Brazilians cast ballots before massing
along busy
boulevards across the country for evening celebrations. Few voting
problems were reported. Serra conceded the election to Lula in a congratulatory
phone call
tonight.
Lula's victory marks the first time a leftist has been elected president
of Latin America's most populous country, and is the clearest demonstration
to date of the
growing backlash against globalization in this part of the world. His
election could mean trouble for the economic reforms backed by the United
States -- in
particular, a hemisphere-wide free-trade zone -- that represent the
Bush administration's most important policy initiatives in Latin America.
While voting in this city's middle-class suburb of Sao Bernardo, Lula
appeared to speak to the millions of Brazilians who have endorsed his pledge
to move the
world's eighth-largest economy away from the "Washington consensus"
followed by his predecessor and toward what he has called a "new economic
model" for this
traditionally conservative country.
"I want to dedicate this election to the suffering poor of our beloved
Brazil," Lula told hundreds of chanting, cheering supporters who had gathered
at the polling
place.
"The result of this election shows that from Jan. 1, we will be responsible
for 170 million Brazilians, and we will have to govern with all of Brazilian
society to build a
more fair, more brotherly and more united country," Lula said in a
victory speech tonight before hundreds of supporters in a downtown hotel
and tens of thousands
more gathered along Paulista Avenue, who watched on closed-circuit
television screens. "We are showing the international community a lesson
in democracy."
Today's election also marked a milestone in Brazil's democracy, which
emerged 17 years ago with the collapse of a repressive military dictatorship.
Lula made his
name as an opponent of that regime, and his apparent broad-based victory
could end the political monopoly that a small, economically powerful elite
has enjoyed for
much of this century.
Lula, who turned 57 today, spent much of the afternoon awaiting election
returns with family and friends in his apartment in Sao Bernardo. Groups
of supporters
gathered throughout the day on the avenue outside, waving flags bearing
the red star of his Workers' Party and celebrating what polls have suggested
would be a
resounding victory after three previous runs for the presidency.
Raised by a single mother, Lula began earning money for his family on
the streets of this city at age 7, and started his first regular job in
a laundry service five years
later. At 17, he was a metal worker at one of the factories that encircle
this city of 17.7 million people, eventually rising to head the 100,000-member
metal workers
union that gave him a perch in Brazil's politics.
At the time, Brazil's military dictatorship was waging a "dirty war"
against student leaders and union organizers in a bid to maintain power.
In 1964, the military
toppled the country's last leftist leader, President Joao Goulart,
after he rose to office from the vice presidency following the resignation
of his predecessor. He was
never elected president.
Brazil's Workers' Party emerged in 1979, largely at Lula's urging, as
a vehicle to speed along the dictatorship's collapse. That eventually occurred
six years later, and
Lula was elected to Congress the next year with more votes than any
other candidate in the country. He made his first run for president three
years later, narrowly
losing to Fernando Collor de Mello, who resigned in 1992 after being
impeached on corruption charges.
But it wasn't until this year, as Brazil suffered through a fourth year
of economic stagnation, that Lula's populist message finally resonated
beyond the labor unions,
landless peasants and urban poor who have long been his political base.
Promising a sharp change of tack from President Fernando Henrique Cardoso's
eight-year
experiment with free-trade agreements and free-market reforms, Lula
has outlined a populist agenda that calls for new spending on social programs
and promises
millions of new jobs.
At the same time, Lula, who begins his four-year term on Jan. 1, has
been trying to appease jittery international markets that have reacted
sharply to his probable
election. Brazil's national currency, the real, has lost 40 percent
of its value against the dollar this year and Brazilian bonds have plummeted.
Lula, who has backed
away from previous threats to default on Brazil's $260 billion public
debt, has called the market reaction "economic terrorism."
Lula, who opposes both U.S. military aid to Colombia and the embargo
on Cuba, has suggested in recent days that he will chart a more moderate
course. He
intends to name a conservative economist to run Brazil's Central Bank,
his aides have suggested in recent days, and he has pledged to abide by
the terms of a recent
$30 billion International Monetary Fund emergency loan approved in
part to keep Brazil from following neighboring Argentina into economic
meltdown.
But he has not backed away from his steadfast opposition to the Free
Trade Area of the Americas, at least as it is currently conceived. New
U.S. steel tariffs and
agriculture subsidies have dimmed prospects for the hemisphere-wide
free-trade zone, a Bush administration priority, and Lula's opposition
to it enjoys large support
within Brazil's business community and disillusioned middle class.
"The rich have gotten richer, the poor have gotten poorer," said Sidney
Marcos, 41, after casting his vote for Lula at the Mario Martins de Almeida
Public School in
Sao Bernardo. Marcos runs a business that helps people and companies
negotiate Brazil's confusing bureaucracy, a popular service across Latin
America.
"I voted for him to change, to see if we can actually do it," he said. "I have more hope than faith that we can."
With its small, comfortable homes and a car in each gated garage, Sao
Bernardo owes its middle-class stability to the powerful union movement
that Lula helped
lead throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Many of its residents work in
the auto industry, and the annual raises guaranteed in union contracts
made them comfortable,
but also helped send Brazil's inflation soaring until Cardoso's arrival.
Now, though, Cardoso's early success seems a distant memory to people like Perpetua Rosa Nogueira Terencio, a 74-year-old housewife.
"I always voted for him," said Nogueira, small and gray-haired with
a cross hanging from her neck. "But life is too expensive now, and the
salaries here are poor.
This is what's most important -- to increase wages. And this is something
we can do."