End of a cycle of Brazilian post-neoliberal government: Worker´s Party, from "Jornadas de Junho" to institutional coup
Latin America. Post-neoliberal governments. Brazil. institutional coup. Dilma Rousseff. Luis Inácio Lula da Silva. Workers’ Party.
Latin America is facing a sort of “end cycle” of the governments that were known as “progressives” or “post-neoliberals”. This heterogeneous group of political forces attained the highest posts of command as a product of the weakening process of the neoliberal parties in the end of the 1990s, and of the economic crisis in Latin America at the beginning of the 2000s. Forces self-declared “national and popular” – as “kirchnerism” in Argentina, the government of Evo Morales in Bolivia, Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, and the Workers’ Party in Brazil – ascended to the presidency of these countries with a program of revenue redistribution and social inclusion, aiming to assimilate movements that opposed the neoliberal offensive within a platform of collaboration with local capitalists. In this project, we want to examine the reasons that called forth the reversal of the post-neoliberal political landscape in Brazil. This process resulted – amid severe contradictions – in the rearrangement of political forces traditionally belonging to the right-wing spectrum: the same parties that were in charge of attacks in the 90s. To sum up, our aim is to answer the following question: why neoliberal right-wing parties succeeded to usurp, without great opposition, millions of votes and apply by way of an institutional coup d’etat, a program that was rejected in the ballots 2014? Our emphasis will be the study-case of the Workers Party (PT) in Brazil, in the period between 2013-2016, as a turning point beginning with the “Jornadas de junho” until the institutional coup d’etat. We are going to take resource in the Marxist thought and theory, as a reference, as in the documents that originated what we now know as the PT.