The Brazilian Workers Party and Organized Social Movements: The Difficult Paths a Radical Democratic Experience

The Brazilian Workers Party (PT) is still the largest left leaning political party in Latin America and has a unique history and structure in the region. PT emerged in Brazil as a unifying force for a diverse group of social movements and organizations that resisted the military dictatorship that lasted from 1964 to 1985 and forged a promise of radical democracy for the country. Although the majority of the party ranks come from labour organizations, PT’s broad political spectrum encompasses a variety of perspectives and interests that range from the progressive Catholic Church to hard left ex-guerrilla groups. Researchers and political figures have described its internal multiplicity, as its greatest strength and one of its major weaknesses. Internal diversity underpinned the design of PT’s internal procedures and organization establishing an intense inner democracy that broke with the hierarchical and personalistic traditions of the Brazilian left. Simultaneously, this interior multiplicity was a driving force for some of PT’s most innovative governmental actions such as its south-south oriented foreign policy, its drive towards the democratization of the Brazilian State, and also it’s redistributive social agenda. This paper presents an analysis of PT’s relations with Brazilian social movements at three different moments: a) first, during its formation and social opposition phase from 1979 to 1989, b) second, its period of institutionalization and parliamentary opposition that ranged from 1990 to 2003, and c) third, its four consecutive national administrations that started in 2004 and ended in 2016 when Dilma Rousseff’s presidency was interrupted by an impeachment process that is perceived as a coup by the party and its allies. The paper will focus on the intense and rich, but often difficult, relations between the internal factions, the positioning of social movements representatives in governments posts and the reaction to the 2016 coup.