Lula’s Unfinished Democracy

Lula’s Unfinished Democracy

The Brazilian president once argued that democracy will founder where inequality reigns. Today, he sees fighting inequality as democracy’s animating mission.

Brazil marked four decades of democratic civilian rule earlier this year. From 1964 to 1985, Latin America’s largest nation was governed by generals who illegally seized and exercised power in the name of anticommunism. By the early 1980s, faced with an economic crisis, social unrest, and growing opprobrium abroad, military officials sought to gradually unwind the regime on their own terms. They issued a broad, self-serving amnesty and allowed for the return of multiparty democracy, inaugurating an era of rampant party proliferation and contentious partisan dispute that deepened Brazil’s democratic character even as it allowed the outgoing regime to avoid facing a unified opposition. It was at this moment that the Workers’ Party (PT) was born.

In 1985, Tancredo Neves of the Brazilian Democratic Movement party, born from what had been the only sanctioned opposition party during the dictatorship, was indirectly elected the country’s first civilian president in twenty-one years. Neves was an experienced senator with solid anti-dictatorship credentials, but a moment of triumph became one of mourning when he fell ill and died before being sworn in, leaving power in the hands of his running mate, José Sarney, a longtime ally of the military regime. Sarney’s leadership raised fresh doubts about how real or lasting Brazil’s democratic transition would be. It was in this uncertain climate that Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a former union leader who was central to the formation of the PT and already one of the loudest voices on the left, consolidated himself as a leading proponent of democracy’s transformative potential.

In a 1985 interview, Lula was asked whether Brazil’s new democratic system was delivering real change for working people. Skeptical of the narrow, elite-driven transition then underway, Lula criticized the idea that simply holding elections was enough. “Do you think the janitor at your newspaper enjoys the same democracy you do,” he asked the interviewer, “just because you both live under the same regime?” When the interviewer replied that, in formal terms, yes—each person’s vote counts the same—Lula pushed back. “No,” he said, “democracy is not just the right to vote. Democracy is the right to life.” Brazil’s profound inequalities, he argued, meant that the tangible benefits of democracy accrued only to a small percentage of the population. The promise of equality, social mobility, and effective political participation was mostly moot for poor and working-class people. Democracy could not be said to exist under such conditions, Lula insisted.

Forty years later, Lula is serving his third term as president, after leading the count...