ABSTRACT
In 2000, Luis Inácio ‘Lula’ da Silva, the leader of Brazil’s left-wing Partido dos Trabalhadores (Workers’ Party – PT), went on television and told the nation,
Unfortunately, in Brazil, the vote is not ideological. Unfortunately, people don’t vote for a political party. And unfortunately, you have a part of society that, because of its great poverty, is led [conduzida] to think with its stomach and not with its head. That’s why there are so many food baskets and milk packs distributed at election time – because this is a kind of trade. And in this way, you depoliticize the electoral process… . You have the logic of maintaining a politics of domination… 1
In this brief polemic, Lula summarized the Brazilian Left’s conviction that grave material deprivation had long buttressed the patron-client exchanges (‘patronage’ or ‘clientelism’) that pervert Brazil’s representative institutions. These perverse exchanges short-circuited Brazilian democracy by depoliticizing the vote, depriving the electorate of an ‘ideology’ of governance grounded in claims about the public good. Accordingly, the elector could not construct an ideological perspective if she did not reckon herself as a member of a collective (the nation, the working class, etc.). Thus, hunger was not just a human
1Lula released this televised statement as part of a public critique of President Fernando Henrique Cardoso’s redistribution measures as mere palliatives tantamount to state patronage. In 2008, the video took on a wide Internet circulation, when Lula’s adversaries cited it as evidence of his hypocrisy (titonio2000 2010). The premise of those critiques was that Lula’s Bolsa Família program was no different from the ‘food basket and milk distribution’ programs of President Cardoso.
