Two Brazilian left-wing parties consider alliance for 2022 elections to confront Bolsonaro

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – The small Socialism and Liberty Party (PSOL) is negotiating an unprecedented alliance with former President Lula da Silva’s large Workers’ Party (PT) to support Lula in 2022, hoping to sweep Jair Bolsonaro off the stage.

The price the PSOL would have to pay could be the absence of a clearly left-leaning economic policy should Lula da Silva become president.

PSOL has been discussing an precedented alliance with leftist rival PT for the 2022 presidential election. If this happens, it would be the first time PSOL does not field its own candidate in order to support the PT candidate in the first round.

The 2022 strategy is supported by the PSOL leadership due to the “gravity of the political moment in Brazil,” but faces internal resistance, according to Estadão/Broadcast Político.

PSOL was formed in 2004 after its founders Heloísa Helena, Luciana Genro, Babá, and João Fontes were expelled from the Workers’ Party (PT) after voting against the pension reform proposed by Lula. Now the party leadership is negotiating support for Lula’s candidacy next year to defeat President Jair Bolsonaro. Guilherme Boulos, the PSOL presidential candidate in 2018, is expected to run for governor of São Paulo state after he came a surprising second in the São Paulo mayoralty race last year.

The ideology of the PSOL party varies between the left and the far left. The programmatic elements found in the party are related to socialism, anti-capitalism, and anti-imperialism. There are Marxist, Trotskyist, eco-socialist, and labor unionist tendencies within the party.

PSOL’s electoral tactics will be discussed at the party’s congress scheduled for September 25 and 26. The party’s current leader, Juliano Medeiros, is one of the proponents of the alliance with PT and will seek a new term as party head.

He belongs to the ‘Socialist Spring’, the majority wing of the PSOL. A minority wing formed by the Socialist Left Movement (MES) is defending a candidacy of its own and wants to enter the 2022 presidential contest with federal deputy Glauber Braga (RJ) as its candidate.

The alliance was discussed during a recent meeting between Medeiros and Brazil’s former President Lula da Silva. One of the conditions PSOL has set to support PT in the first round is a strong defense of a more left-leaning economic policy, including lifting the constitutional spending cap that limits spending growth to the previous year’s inflation. Lifting the cap as a key proposal is not a consensus in PT and was therefore introduced into the debates.

The PSOL president admitted in an interview with Broadcast Político that he is negotiating with PT for support in the first round. “It is a possibility that takes into account the seriousness of the situation in Brazil and will consider programmatic aspects, the alliance arc and possible electoral arrangements in the states that are of interest to PSOL,” Juliano Medeiros said.

However, a minority wing of PSOL is trying to maintain the strategy it has pursued recently by entering its own candidacy in the first round of the election. Lula’s alleged ‘softness’ toward the Centrão voting bloc and the corporate sector bothers the party’s most radical members, many of whom left PT precisely because Lula deviated from his former far-left policies after he was elected in 2002.

“This unity that everyone is against Bolsonaro does not presuppose the subordination of our ideas to theses that have already had the opportunity to govern; on the contrary, it is also necessary to present a program that goes to the root of the problems,” said Fernanda Melchionna (RS), in favor of the candidacy of Glauber Braga.

As priorities, the deputy mentions the taxation of large fortunes, the audit of the public debt, and “a left program that does not accept politics of class reconciliation or alliances with parties of the bourgeoisie.”