The Necessary,the Possible,and the Impossible

A book about the 10 years of an administration that has profoundly transformed Brazil cannot avoid giving a word to its principal protagonist, the person without whom this process would not have been possible and certainly would not have achieved so great a success. Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is a practical and intuitive statesman who seeks concrete solutions to problems. It has been in good measure due to this ability that Brazil has witnessed a political achievement that has made possible to the prioritizing of social aims, the attainment of egalitarian policies, the assertion of Brazilian sovereignty abroad, and the recovery of an active role for the state in creating rights for its citizenry.

These advances are analyzed in a recent book (Filmus et al., 2013) and interpreted by Lula in the following interview, which took place in the São Paulo office of the Lula Institute on February 14, 2013. It provides elements to help us understand a fundamental decade of Brazilian history. The vision of someone who has been and continues to be an outstanding figure of world politics in the twenty-first century helps us interpret an era of exceptional value in the struggle to build in Brazil a more just and democratic society. ¹

How would you assess the years in government of the Partido dos Trabalhadores (Workers’ Party—PT) and its allies?

These years, even if they were not the best ones, were some of the best years that this country has lived through for a very long time. If we were to analyze all the shortfalls we are still suffering from, the vital needs of the people that in most cases have been long overlooked by this country’s governments, we would find that we still have much more to do to ensure that our people receive all that their citizenship entitles them to. But if we analyze what we have achieved, we will find that other countries have not in 30 years achieved what we have managed to achieve in 10. We have broken the taboos and preconceived assumptions of quite a number of economists, sociologists, and historians and shattered some of their “truths.” For a start, we have proved that it is quite possible to grow the economy while improving the distribution of income—that it is not necessary to wait for it to grow before you begin redistributing it. Next, we have proved that it is possible to have wage increases without inflation. Over these past 10 years, organized labor has enjoyed higher incomes in real terms. . . . The minimum wage has gone up almost 74 percent, and inflation has remained under control. Third, we have increased both our foreign trade and our domestic market without their coming into conflict. Previously, we had been told that it was just not possible to grow both the external and the internal markets simultaneously. These are some of the taboos we have broken. And at the same time we have done something that I consider extremely important: we have proved that a little money in a lot of pockets is income distribution and that a lot of money in a few pockets is income concentration.

And did people in general realize that these taboos were being broken?

A lot of the middle class and the wealthy did finally come to understand. Those who poked fun at the Zero Hunger Program, ² increasing the availability of credit to family farms, . . . the Luz para Todos (Electricity for All) Program, and all our other social policies—those who sarcastically called them all “handouts” or “charity” and derided them as “welfare”—realized that there were now millions of Brazilians who had a little cash in hand, and this increased buying power was starting to stabilize the country’s economy, making it grow, and to generate more jobs and more income. This is a logic everybody should be able to understand. Can there be any place in the world where people are going to produce if they have not first consumed? If we had tried growing the economy by relying on exports, the people would have been furious. You can have grand ideas of boosting production for export, but this will never benefit more than 35 percent of the population, especially because modern sophisticated factories do not employ more workers. Jobs today are created in the service sector, and even here there are fewer than there used to be. We have always to ask ourselves: what country in the world will grow if its people lack any purchasing power, if they cannot buy what is made in the domestic market?

From the economic viewpoint, I believe we set the nation’s life off in a new direction. We built the conditions for interest rates to be reduced to a level that society could accept.

Do you think you fulfilled the promises you made to the Brazilian people in the two campaigns in which you secured your election as President?

At the end of my first term, I asked Clara Ant ³ to conduct an appraisal of the government’s program. I wanted to know if we had fulfilled it. We had more than fulfilled it. And in the second term we did more than what we had managed to achieve in the first term.

This is important. If you decide on a program, set out your aims and fulfill them. People know whether you have done so. And the result of all this? The people will feel that they have taken part in your government. They will say, “I am as good as this fellow” or even “This fellow is on my side.” And they are thinking the same about Dilma. [Brazilians] have begun to feel part of our program. They know, they contribute, they give their opinions, whether they are in favor or not. . . . This was enshrined in our national conferences. We could not draw up the federal budget collectively, ⁴ so we decided to create ways in which the people could take part. We encouraged public meetings in each município [county], in each state, and nationally. It was just a wonderful way for the president to hear what people had to say. I went to 95 percent of the national ones. I would stay two or three hours sitting on the platform hearing people complain, react, tell me what was going well and what was going badly. I would leave with a record of what they had said that we could use as a standard to improve everything we were doing.

What was the great legacy of your 10 years in government?

In those 10 years we Brazilians all recovered our pride in ourselves, each one of us. We recovered our self-respect. We achieved things that had previously seemed impossible. We got to be more respected on the world stage. People in other countries no longer think of Brazil just in terms of street children, Pelé, and Carnival. They know that this country now has a government, that this country has a policy, that this country has even begun to be taken as a reference point for many things that are decided in the world.

This is a legacy for which these 10 years will be remembered, and I am convinced that with comrade Dilma in government to carry on with our policies this legacy will, without question, become enshrined.

I start with the projection that we will enter 2016 as the world’s fifth-largest economy. But it is more important to be clear that the greater objective is not for Brazil to be number five or number four in the world. What really matters is to achieve day-to-day improvement in the quality of life of the Brazilian people, whether we look at their wage levels, their housing conditions, or their public health.

All this has been the great legacy of these 10 years: we have discovered ourselves and what we are. We are no longer treated as second-class citizens. We have the right to travel by air, to enter a shopping mall and buy the things that the whole world has always wanted to buy. And we have got back the delight of being Brazilians, the pleasure of loving our own country.

What is it about your administration that has given you the most pride?

I feel pride—and in this case it is a very personal pride, even one with a little vanity in it—in entering history as the only Brazilian president with no university degree but one who has given the country more universities that it had before. Their number I always quote, because it is going to be difficult for anyone to exceed: some 14 new federal universities, 126 new campuses, and 214 technical schools. And that is not counting my last two years, as I do not yet know how many more were opened in that period.

Yesterday I received a chap, a bus driver, who thanked me not just for his son’s achievement of a degree in medical biology for also for his law degree, both obtained via the Programa Universidad para Todos. ⁵ Things like this happen because, after years of fear and false conceptions, the people now have the confidence to take the first steps toward governing this country.

When you began your administration, you must have had some idea of what it would be like. How far did what you achieved and what you failed to achieve differ from that first idea, and why?

We had a program, but it did not seem to be working. I remember what Luiz Furlan ⁶ would tell me whenever we had a meeting: “We have been in office for so many days, and we have only so many days left, so we need to decide what we want to get done by the end of our mandate. What image do we want to have taken of us?” And my reply would be: “Furlan, this image is already being taken.” We cannot just rush to get results. We have to be able to show at the end of our mandate that we have been able to achieve what we promised. If we just attend to the headlines we get in the papers, people will think we are doing fine, but we shall end up not achieving anything.

It goes like this. I plant a jabuticaba [Brazilian grape tree]. If it grows into a healthy shrub, someone is going to protest: “This is not giving any fruit: it is growing too slowly.” If I then cut it down and plant something else instead, I am never going to have any jabuticaba fruit. So I just have to believe that if I leave it and manure it properly I will end up with some decent jabuticaba fruit. And I can give similar examples about my government. Soy beans need 120 days before they can be harvested. Black beans take 90 days. It does no good to say, “I planted that a week ago, and there is still no sign of any shoot above ground.” You have to be patient. I believe I was the president who most often had to counsel “patience, patience.” Without it, you just go mad. There are those in politics who get up each morning, read the papers, and want to give them an immediate answer, and from then on all they manage to do is to answer the papers. But I did not get elected just to answer to them. I was elected to run the country. And this gives me time to make sure that the government’s program gets fulfilled.

And when did you lose patience?

Clearly, we had problems at the beginning. Do you think it easy for a metalworker to sit down in the presidential chair I had seen so many times before on television, occupied by so many people far more important than I was . . . ? It was just like sleeping in the same room as other important people—important, that is, at least according to public opinion. And I kept asking myself, “Can I really be sitting here?”

At the start I was really worried. “Are we really going to manage all this?” I asked myself. “Is it going to be possible for us to get it all done?” But I believe we have. We have made some mistakes, and it has been quite a struggle, but we have done it.

Even the simplest things got us worried. When I proposed to Congress the setting up of the Conselho de Desenvolvimento Econômico e Social [Economic and Social Development Council—CDES], they thought we were trying to create a new decision-making body outside congressional control or oversight. Even our own supporters in Congress thought so. There was very little trust in our good intentions. But I knew that for our administration to have any hope of success, I had to inspire trust not only among the working class but also among the other branches of Brazilian society. This required a lot of discussion and dialogue, but we did win this trust in the end.

We made mistakes, of course, many of them. The year 2005 was a real mixup. That was when Roberto Jefferson made his allegations about corruption, ⁷ putting us in a very awkward situation. If we had not been very careful, we would have done nothing but discuss his allegations for the rest of my term: certainly this is what the press wanted. One day I got home and said [to my wife], “Marisa, if we want to go on governing this country, then starting today we shall have to stop watching television, looking at the news weeklies, or reading the papers.” I got to spending half an hour each day talking to my press secretary to learn what was in the news . . . , but I never gave in and let myself switch on the television or I would have been lost. I realized that it simply was not all that important. We formed a situation room, where my crew was made up of Dilma, Ciro [Gomes], ⁸ Gilberto [Carvalho], and Marcio [Thomaz Bastos]. ⁹ It would be quite funny. I would arrive in the Palace to find everybody quite worried. I would be perfectly calm myself and would ask them, “What have you all been looking at: the newspapers . . . ? Then what is bothering you?”

Which of your terms was the harder for achieving the aims of your government: the first or the second?

The final outcome [of the two terms] was most encouraging in the way we got the results we were after. Look: The press wanted me to create more jobs in 4 years than the others had achieved in 20. We had never said anything about creating 10 million. Our administration’s program was this: “Brazil needs to create 10 million jobs.” I never said that I would be the one to create them. Brazil needed this number to solve the unemployment problem. Well, in 10 years we have created, so far, almost 18 million real proper jobs with proper signed contracts.

We did make some mistakes in the beginning. I remember we had announced during the election our First Job campaign. The idea was for government to pay employers to hire people. We found that inventing jobs does not work. The idea might have sounded great in the electoral campaign, but an employer is only going to hire a worker if he needs him. Not even the state takes on workers it does not need, so why should a private employer? We drafted such a law, we got it enacted, but we soon saw that it was not going to work. But what would? The original idea: “Give a little spending power to the poorest sectors of the population and things would start to happen.” And that was how it was and how our program was fulfilled: things that had seemed difficult became simple. Would to God that other people copy us. But actually, what we did [in our second term] between 2007 and 2010 or, more precisely, between January 1, 2007, and December 31, 2010, would be quite hard to repeat. This is because we had already served our apprenticeship the first time around, and we were now better attuned. Dilma took charge of the cabinet with great competence, and with our Programs for Increased Growth things began to happen. We had a program for education, another for science and technology . . . and everything began surging ahead wonderfully. Everything got easier, though of course our “friends” in the media went on treating us as if we were the enemy.

What do you make of your relations with the media?

At times it was quite sad. My impression is that the hatred the [owners of the media] had of the Workers’ Party was not for our mistakes but for our successes, the good things we did. Maybe they were mad at me because, through the whole of my presidency, I never went to any of their dinner parties, never visited any of them at their homes, never visited any of their editorial offices. This was not a president’s job. I no more accepted their dinner invitations than I accepted those of anybody else. I never attended a wedding, a birthday party, or a christening. I did not even go to my own party colleagues’ birthdays. I had dozens of wedding invitations and went to none of them, because, as I would put it, “The president is not going to expose himself.” Nowadays, with cell phones, nobody asks permission for anything: not before taking a photograph, not before making a tape recording, nothing.

There is a lot of hypocrisy about politics. The political class has to react to win respect. Every normal person can get drunk, but not the politician. A politician has to be perfect, to attain the sort of perfection that just does not exist, not even among our critics. And we accept this. I have long been saying, especially to young people, “Look, the perfection you are hoping for in a politician is something I simply do not have. But you do! So get up off your backsides and into politics. Become candidates, set up a political party.” In my inaugural speech there were three promises: “First, I am going to do what needs to be done, then I am going to do what can be done, and, when there is nothing left to the imagination, I shall be doing the impossible.” And I hit the target. And what is key in all this is never being afraid to talk to the people. When your approval rate is at 92 percent in the opinion polls, you have no need to talk to the people, but you must talk to the people when push comes to shove and you are being accused and made fun of. Then you have to look them straight in the eye and tell it how it is. They know perfectly how to tell lies from truth and who is really on their side.

What was it your government did to get so hostile a reaction from the establishment and the media? Considering what the Workers’ Party administrations actually achieved, wasn’t the reaction of the forces of the opposition out of proportion?

In 1979, when the flag was raised to fight for the freedom for people to organize politically, I was perhaps the one and only person that the national trade union movement could have united behind. I remember that day in a meeting with the MDB [Movimento Democrático Brasileiro (Brazilian Democratic Movement)] in São Bernardo do Campo when I introduced the idea of creating a Workers’ Party. But for everyone on the platform, the new political freedom was not about creating any new parties. It was to convert the MDB into the PMDB [Partido do Movimento Democrático Brasileiro (Brazilian Democratic Movement Party)], the party in which we would one day soon all be fighting together against the dictatorship. And when we went ahead anyway, what was their reaction? “You just cannot have a party like that, one created by ordinary working people, run by the workers themselves. Get real! There is no such thing as a ‘workers’ party’ anywhere in the world. How on earth can these factory workers in the ABC, these bank tellers, these lab assistants, form a political party?” But that is just what we did. So then they said we would never go beyond a nice little wildly radical fringe movement. But we did not form the Workers’ Party to be “nice and pretty” or even wildly radical. We formed it to achieve power.

But you were pretty radical at the start . . .

The PT was quite rigid, and it was this rigid discipline that allowed it to get to where it is. Only, when a party undergoes rapid growth, all sorts of people join it. In other words, when you set out your objective as leading a mass movement into power, you let in both lambs and lions, but you do achieve power. But the others saw our seeking power not as something whose existence as an electoral alternative would benefit democracy, as something perfectly normal, but as a fight à outrance: win who can, and no more talking. Is this not how it is? They never thought this could happen. I was just an interloper who got in the way, like the guest who has not been directly invited to the party but is let in anyway: “All right, fellow, if you insist.” So we get in, and then, what is worse, we succeed. So then they tried to use this business of the mensalão [Roberto Jefferson’s allegations] to discredit the Workers’ Party, and, of course, put an end to my administration. Many people at the time were saying, “The PT has died, it’s finished.” Six years on and it is they who are finished. I do not even know whether their DEM [Partido Democrata—Democrat Party] even exists any more! The PSDB [Partido da Social Democracia Brasileira—Brazilian Social Democratic Party] has not created any new leaders or promoted any leadership, so it is trying to recreate Fernando Henrique Cardoso as he was in his youth. This must surely increase the contempt they have for us, which, however, we refuse to reciprocate.

Are you not just mad at the opposition?

No, I am not “mad” at them, and I do not hold grudges. What I do have against them is this: they never made as much money in their lives as they made under my government. Not the television channels, which were nearly all bankrupt, or the newspapers, nearly all bankrupt when I took over government. Nor had the corporations and the banks ever made so much, but the working class won out as well. I cannot think of a moment ever in the history of humankind when businesses were doing badly and the workers managed to achieve anything except an increase in unemployment.

Why did this never translate into more favorable treatment by the media of your administration or of Dilma’s?

Brazil is doing just fine, but you would never know this from the Brazilian press. It is simply unbelievable. When [the Portuguese socialist leader] Mário Soares came to Brazil to interview me, he brought with him various foreign newspapers, including Le Monde, Der Spiegel, and the Financial Times, and remarked: “Lula, I must be going mad. I have just come from a Europe where all the press are saying good things of Brazil, praising it to the heavens, and here I read the Brazilian papers and they are saying that the country is finished, with nothing going right.” And this still applies today. If you want to be correctly informed, you have a couple of columnists and a business newspaper, which I am not going to name, who provide fair coverage. Among the magazines, Carta Capital will give you something interesting to read. All the rest are forecasting the end of the world.

Is there some political plot behind the way the press is behaving?

Look, even if we were incompetent—and in fact we have been successful at a lot of things, and Dilma has already achieved quite a lot—this country can only go on and up, because it has 380 million hectares [940 million acres] of forest reserve, 12 percent of all the fresh water on the planet: it’s a country that has a 8,000-kilometer [4,655-mile] coastline, a country that possesses the Pre-Sal [the untapped reserves of the pre-Salt Santos basin], and a country that has a population eager to improve its living standards. Such a country simply cannot go wrong. It needs only a government that can stimulate it, only a government ready to give it the opportunity, and the people of such a country can only grow and progress. But because they have never done this, they are really worried, even annoyed. And this is why the media act as if they were a political party, because the political parties they believed in are almost exhausted. Just do a little research and you will soon see just how different the Workers’ Party is from its rivals. I am just thinking how much more they must be hating me after this recent trial of strength here in São Paulo: they were all ready to cry “Lula defeated!” But when [Fernando] Haddad ¹⁰ won, they did not know what to say. One section of the media began to try to turn itself into a replacement of the political parties. In other words, the debate that should have been going on in Congress, between the parties, and by society, this debate began to be monopolized by the media. This was being done solely by the editorial staff, and within it by just a few columnists, all of them partisans who claimed not to be political and made out that they were impartial. This is terrible, quite awful.

And this denial by the press of their partisanship is itself a political act?

To try to claim that you are above politics is disastrous, and it is a mistake that can be made as readily by the right as by the left. To try to deny that you are being political does not achieve your aim anywhere in the world. And what has happened since then is worse. Happy the nation that has strong institutions as its mouthpieces, be they parties, labor unions, churches, or social movements. The stronger such institutions and social movements are, the surer we can be that democracy is guaranteed. And this is what they just do not understand.

Would a Workers’ Party administration have had the same characteristics if you had won the earlier presidential elections?

No! I thank God I didn’t win in 1988 and had to wait another 12 years. This is not because I like to lose. No one ever thanks God for losing. It is because these 12 years of waiting were, perhaps, the time needed for the PT to go through its apprenticeship, to develop competence, gather experience in public administration. We won important city mayoralties and state governorships. When I finally came to form a federal administration, I had a solid, hardened base in the PT, and the parties we were allied with were also more hardened.

But you dropped out after your second defeat . . .

Indeed, I was quite hesitant when I made my third attempt, in 1998, and again at my fourth attempt in 2002, for fear of the same result. I had already, on three occasions, won 30 percent of the votes on the first ballot. Three times I went on to the runoff election, and every time I came in second. I had run for president in 1989, 1994, and 1998. ¹¹ So when the time came for a possible fourth attempt, I said, “I cannot just do the same thing over again. We have to do something else. We have to give a different signal to the people of this country.” Then something happened that was God beckoning me. You all don’t believe in God, but I do, sincerely. Well, then, there was to be a celebration in honor of José Alencar’s 50 years in business in Minas Gerais. ¹² I had been invited but was intending to stay away. José Dirceu was president of the Workers’ Party at the time, and I was its honorary president. I told him that I was not going. “Whatever would I do there if I went? I have nothing in common with José Alencar.” But José Dirceu replied, “Let’s go. He belongs to a party we are allied with, and he is a senator: let’s go.” In the end I agreed, and we went. When we arrived a number of state governors and government ministers were there and quite a few senators. Alencar’s chief assistant came up and asked me to speak, but I declined. “The man who should speak is José Dirceu, as he is the president of our party; I shall not be speaking myself.” I left it at that. Speeches followed by many people, of whom Zé Alencar spoke last. He told us his whole life story, and when he had finished I chose at last to say something: “Zé, I have just found my running mate for president. And it is this guy here: yourself!”

You had not known him before then?

No, I had not, but an idea had come to me: “This is the very guy I need.” Then, the next week I lost in the dispute over the chairmanship of the Senate by one vote: his. So I went to Brasília to have a chat with him. That was when we agreed that he should be my running mate, and to do that he would have to resign from the PMDB. He agreed. When we held a rally in the Anhembi [an exhibit hall in São Paulo] to launch his candidacy, some of those in the crowd tried to boo him. He had had a written speech ready, but he laid it aside to address the audience directly: “When I was rather younger than any of you now booing me, I was sleeping on a street bench and going to work from there.” That made everyone fall silent and won the PT over. From then on the party would call on him to be its speaker on anything and anywhere. Our next move was to draw up the “Letter to the Brazilian Nation,” ¹³ a most necessary document. I had been against it. I was thoroughly against it, because it talked of things that I did not want to discuss, but today I realize that it was extremely important. We were having to arrange alliances. You must remember that, during my first term, we never had the support of the PMDB. So in the first round of the 2002 presidential election we had the support of almost no other party. ¹⁴ We campaigned alone, but I never even for a moment dreamed that we might lose. I was sure the election was mine. I remember how nervous everyone was when I came to hear the count on television, with Duda Mendonça ¹⁵ and Zé Dirceu and the computer. We did not manage to win on the first round, but I told everybody, “Look, folks, our victory has only been delayed for 40 days. We are going to win in the end!”

And I said this with real conviction. Then in the run-up to the second round, we began talks with the other political parties. Our main concern, obviously, was to achieve a stable government. To make our position crystal-clear: to get anything done, we needed 50 percent plus one of the votes in both the House and the Senate. If we did not achieve this bare majority, we would be unable to govern. At the start of these negotiations, the PMDB was not with us, although some in the party were favorable. But we managed to forge an alliance with some of the parties in the middle.

You built up a strategy of alliances that made it possible for people coming from other parts of the political spectrum to legitimate progressive policies. But your plan was not always understood, yet you never set up a discourse to justify your alliance building. What was your logic?

It is quite funny, really! It is always OK for the right to build alliances. When ACM [Antonio Carlos Magalhaes] ¹⁶ was negotiating an alliance in support of Fernando Henrique Cardoso, the press saw it as an act of genius, of political genius, of constructive statesmanship. But when it was our turn, they began asking, “What on earth is the PT doing, holding talks with these people?” But we went ahead all the same. We had to, if we were to have any hope of forming a government. We had simply been learning how to get politics to work and how, when you seek a coalition, your allies have to share in your government. This is how things are in any democracy in the world. Unless and until we have some political reform in Brazil, it is going to be like this. Whoever wins, whoever wants to run a government, will have to work with Congress, with both its houses, and with the trade union movement, and with business. That is how you govern. So we went through a very important stage of dialogue with all the sectors of society. I secured an extraordinary relationship, from the trash pickers and garbage scavengers to the bank and business owners. I maintained a civilized relationship with every segment of society. In every speech I gave I remembered to insist, “I govern in the interests of everybody, although I keep my keenest eye out for those at the bottom of the heap.” But of course everyone knew this perfectly well. I knew where I was coming from, and I knew where I would go when I left the office of president. This let us have what I would claim to be a sincere relationship with the parties and the various sectors of society. And the parties did play an important role in our success in government. I do not see that it should have been any different. And it is a good thing when you have problems: the more you have, the more you have to exercise democracy to resolve them, and the more problems you resolve, the stronger you get.

And negotiation is a precondition for government solidity?

There are politicians—and this is something that you, Emir, as a political scientist can never forget—politicians in Congress who think this way: good government is weak government, because when the government is weak, that is when we are in charge, when we decide. So what is it that many such politicians are after? A weak government, one with no real power, for then pressure builds up, more and more things need to get done. When a government is going well, it is much easier to govern, but even a properly functioning government cannot openly oppose Congress. Government has to understand that the exercise of democracy is living with diversity. To my way of thinking, democracy is not a pact of silence. It is a society moving in different directions, responding to a variety of pressures, and this is what we have to learn to live with. We have been learning how to build the necessary alliances. This happens even at the state and local government levels. If it did not, we just could not govern. And often when you are governing alone, you get into more difficulty. Remember what happened when José Sarney was president? In 1986 the PMDB held a majority in the Constituent Assembly and 23 governorships. Ask Sarney if he found it easy to govern with a majority in Congress. He did not. In this game of democracy, you have to talk with different forces, and if they are at odds with each other this often helps the government more than if you had 300 waving the same flag.

What am I afraid of? Of people deciding to despise democracy and preferring to enforce the dictatorship of one party over the others. I am not, you know, very fond of the word “hegemony.” The exercise of hegemony in politics is a bad thing. Even when you have the majority, it is important that you retain the humility to practice democracy. This is what consolidates a country’s institutions, and this is what I did during my administration, and it is what Dilma is doing now, and with great competence.

The old taboos were broken, on the left and on the right. How did you feel about this?

The path we set out on is proving the right one: be flexible but get a grip on what is important. We started the Zero Hunger Program way back in 2003, at a time when we were not supposed to be able to do anything. In 2004 I did not even have the courage to go to São Paulo to celebrate May Day. [Luiz] Marinho ¹⁷ telephoned me from the parade along the Avenida Paulista. “Lula, come on down, we are about to give you a party.” I replied “No, Marinho, I am not coming. And you know why? Things are going pretty badly for me.” “But why don’t you come?” “Marinho, I am not coming because we have been unable to afford any increase in the minimum wage.” And he said, “Here, that will be no problem.” “Marinho, it is not because of you, but because I do not feel good about it. So I am not ready to take part in celebrating May Day.” I felt utterly crushed. I had gotten round to thinking, “It’s not even worth becoming president if I cannot even raise the minimum wage.”

This is perhaps the outlook that let me perform better in the years that followed. We got things in order, and it all began to work. Every seed I had planted started to grow, at the right time, and on time. We had problems with our supporters, and it was not easy. It was particularly difficult to fire anyone. The hardest moment came when I had to call someone to tell him, “Comrade, look, I am really sorry, but I need to give your job to someone else and you will just have to go.” It is a very awkward business. In a big company there is no problem, because there the boss of a corporation never knows the employee he is firing personally. It is someone whom he appointed several ranks below him that he is now ordering out. Some civil servant in a government ministry, fine; but an actual minister? It is the president who summons him and the president who dismisses him. We do give him notice: “We need a solution within two weeks.” But even so, this means a delay. . . . Just imagine if I had done nothing at all!

These were eight years that allowed me at their end to give Brazil the present of its electing its first woman president. This was something else that was most difficult to achieve. I remember arguing with my friends: friends, mark you, not opponents. They would insist: “Lula, you just cannot do this. She has no experience, she is not up to the mark. For the love of God, Lula!” And my reply: “Comrades, we just have to surprise the nation with something new. Go on doing the same old thing: that is what everybody does. Now we are going to take Brazil by surprise with something really new.”

Brazil has changed a lot in these 10 years. Have you?

One of the good things about growing old is that you can take advantage of what life has taught you rather than going on about your increasing age. Life has taught me a lot. To create a political party under the conditions in which we grew up was very difficult. Now that the party is a really big one, everything has got easier. But I used to travel the country to have meetings with just three people attending, or four, or five. I went from here in São Paulo to Acre for a meeting with ten to persuade Chico Mendes to join the PT and to persuade João Maia—that chap who had taken money to vote for Fernando Henrique Cardoso and was one of CONTAG’s [Confederación Nacional dos Trabalhadores na Agricultura (National Confederation of Agriculural Workers)] lawyers—to join too. It was very difficult to form a group and travel up to the Northeast, by bus, spend a whole week traveling there, having meetings at midday under a glaring tropical sun, explaining what the PT was, so as to make people eager to join.

Yes, I have changed. I have changed because I have learned a lot, life has also taught me, but I still have the same ideals. It only makes sense to govern if you do so in order to help those in the most need to better their lives. All people need is opportunities. With the right opportunity, all of them can be equal. Some may be smarter than others, but no one is a complete mule. They only need to be given a chance. And we have begun to do this. The job is not yet finished by any means. You do not sweep away generations of mistakes in just one generation. Such things take time. But we are on the right road, and things are going well.

And has the PT changed?

There are two PTs. One is the congressional, parliamentary PT, the PT of the people in command. The other PT is the one that forms the base of the party. I would claim that 90 percent of this base is just about the same as it was 1980. It still wants to have a party free of all political alliances, but it is, at the same time, aware that, to win power, political alliances just have to be made. It is a base that is very demanding and very united, but it is, nevertheless, something that part of the establishment in Brazil does not even know exists. This section of the establishment knows the PT only very superficially. The PT is very strong in our social movements. It is very strong away from our big cities. But it is not always this fortress that supplies the party’s voting strength. We also have the electoral PT. And we are now at the stage where either we reform our politics and change their logic or our politics are going to turn even more perverted than they were before, at any time in our country’s history. People must understand that we do not just need public financing of political campaigns but using private money in them should be a felony with no chance of getting bail and you should have a mixed model for elections with a party list and another list of candidates. What we cannot do is to carry on just as we are, in the same old way. Honestly, that is just not possible.

Why?

Elections in Brazil are getting to be very complicated affairs, as they are throughout the world. Here in Brazil, if the PT does not respond to this situation, few other parties are likely to. The PT just has to respond and try to get a public debate going on political reform. I tried to when I was president, suggesting a constitutional assembly concerned solely with this problem. That way you would be electing people who are going to be concerned only with political reform, who will be elected to Congress, change the whole nature of the game, and then go away, after which new congressional elections could be held [along these new lines]. The one thing we cannot do is to continue as we are.

At times I feel as if political parties are just a business when they should really be something extremely important for society. Society has to believe in the idea of political parties and take part in running them.

But has not the PT changed for the better?

The PT has changed because it has learned the need for democracy to exist along with diversity. But on some occasions it has wandered off course in exactly the way that it has criticized as totally mistaken when other political parties have done it. It is this and the game of getting elected that is becoming the rule: if a politician has no money he cannot become an electoral candidate and there is no way he can get elected.

When your party is still small, nobody asks such a question, but you begin to get asked about it when your party becomes an alternative to the government in power. And the PT just has to learn this. The stronger the PT becomes, the more serious it has to be about such matters. I have no wish to hold any prejudice against anyone, but I believe that the PT must recover its belief in the values that ordinary people believe in and that have been reduced to banalities in the fight for votes. Such belief is a legacy that we have to bequeath to our children and grandchildren. We have to show that policies can be adopted with a real chance of being put into effect. You can play the political game, make political alliances, form political coalitions, but you do not have to enter into a promiscuous relationship with other parties in doing so. The PT urgently needs to change and hold to this as its price in any alliance and as the practical exercise of democracy. But it does not have to go back to being as sectarian as it was when it was originally founded.

Are you done with sectarianism and militancy?

Those days are indeed over, yes. Nowadays a campaign on television is very expensive. People are no longer ready to work out of pure idealism. They want to be paid. Why? Because every municipal council member, every state or federal representative has his own staff of 5, 6, 10, 15, or 20 people working for him. A supporter from a precinct asks, “Why should I work for free? I want my share too.” So, it all gets steadily more difficult, and, I would say, the old idealism is being lost.

My three eldest children were brought up having to sleep on the sidewalks of Santo André, São Bernardo, São Caetano, São Paulo City, and Mauá. They helped organize the PT, parading along the streets with a trumpet to drum up support, while [my wife] Marisa and other women supporters raised money for it, selling T-shirts. This made family life very difficult but very happy and pleasant, and very rewarding. Such campaigning has greatly fallen away, especially in the big cities, but the PT has got to try to revive something of this side of Brazilian politics. And, may I say in passing, Rui Falcão ¹⁸ has been doing wonders in this respect.

What role has the federal civil service played in your administration? In this connection, what about the story of the bridge in that maroon settlement that you tried to get built when Mário Covas was governor of São Paulo?

In 1993 I visited a quilomba community [in upstate Sao Paulo] and saw children who had to travel to school by boat on a very fast-running river. I went to Mário Covas, who was governor at the time, to ask him to get a bridge built, even a rope one, or some way to avoid their having to run the dangers of a boat ride on such a torrential stream. When in 2003 I became president, no such bridge had yet been built. I declared, “I want a bridge and now!” So we contracted the Brazilian army to do it as the cheapest way to get it done. Even so, it took eight years, but finally it is finished.

Yes, the civil service is a problem. But first we have to take into account that it is very good at looking after its own interests. It may be poor at defending the interests of whoever heads the government, but in defending the interests of the bureaucracy itself it is, indeed, very competent.

I would like to compare government to a railroad train. The bureaucracy is a station on the line. Every so often a train arrives, and eventually another. The PT’s train whistles louder and makes more smoke, but the station stays right where it always was, permanently. And that is where the bureaucrats are—the people who sell you your train ticket, the people who write down I am not sure what, who are forever watching. That is where they are. The train steams off. Then another arrives, with a less strident whistle, making less of a racket and expending less energy. The station, the bureaucratic apparatus, is already in place and does not move, but the train does. Every blessed hour a new train comes in, and the station stays where it always was.

What does a civil servant do? Government makes some decisions, and how does a bureaucrat who has been there for the past 25 years react? Especially now, with all this threat of whistleblowers? He responds, “This guy comes and tells me I must do this or that? This guy who has been in government a mere 4 years, while I have sat here for 25! If I do something wrong, I risk being sued. I am going to have to engage a lawyer, and my goods and chattels could be seized by the courts. And when I am gone, nobody is even going to remember me. Much better to avoid the risk by doing nothing. Time will safely pass.”

But this way, wouldn’t it have been almost impossible to get things done?

Well, yes, impossible, at least within the same term in office. For example, as president, I discuss something with a government ministry and come up with a decision that we announce to the press. The minister leaves my office, and I have to talk it over with Guido Mantega. ¹⁹ I arrange a meeting with him as soon as this is possible, and we agree on the necessary arrangements. But the Planning Ministry has to approve it. I go there, to be told, “OK, but we have a problem with the National Heritage Institute [Instituto do Patrimônio Histórico e Artístico Nacional—IPHAN]; you will have to check with them.” So I go to IPHAN, only to discover another problem, with the Environment Ministry. This is getting serious, and our plan is under a real threat. So I have to go the minister of the environment, only to have him insist that it is not up to his ministry at all but to IPHAN. So I trek back to IPHAN, and when everything is finally ready, the project goes out to bid. But then the company with the losing bid decides to sue the winner. And by now your term of office is up and your election promise unfulfilled. It is all very complicated. No modern government ever embarks on a big project, engages all the contractors, and gets it finished within a presidency of just four years. It simply is not possible.

Is this where the challenge lies in determining and carrying out the government’s program?

The machinery of government has some outstanding projects. And just where is Brazil in all this? Stuck at the planning stage. We just do not have anywhere to plan strategic projects. They were all done away with by the Collor administration. It was he who abolished GEIPOT [Grupo Executivo de Integração da Política de Transportes (Executive Group for Integrated Transportation Policy)], for example, which had been more or less set up to do precisely this. The only agency left that we could provide with funds to start planning projects was the Programa de Aceleração e Crescimento, later renamed Programa de Expansão do Crescimento [Program for the Acceleration of Growth—PAC]. All the nationalized industries that used to undertake strategic planning had long since been privatized. Brazil had not planned any sizable project for 20 years. We also had to change the law on government contracts. Private enterprise is good at what it understands, avoiding 90 percent of the bureaucratic obstacles that hinder government. And this is where the idea comes from that only public agencies are corrupt. We need to look into how private initiative works to see what the real situation is. There are dark areas we need to investigate.

Do you feel frustrated that you never managed to reform the way Brazil is run?

We began our administration with an important reform, that of public sector pensions. A lot of people, many of them honest and sincere, were against this. But we felt that, even in private life, a household could not survive if it cost the same to have a child without a paying job as to have one who was bringing in income. In the government machine there are cases in which you have more retired employees drawing pensions than staff drawing salaries for actually working. And when you want to give the workers a pay raise, you are obligated to pay out an equal increase in the pensions of those no longer working. But this simply cannot go on. We are changing the law, but this is not easy. We have tried to reform the labor code. We created a labor commission, with membership from both the trade union federations (the Força Sindical and the Central Única dos Trabalhadores) and the employers. They came pretty close to an agreement but never quite reached one. I kept telling them, “You must try to agree, because the government is not going to do it for you. None of you has to win 100 percent of what you want, but you must come together and agree on something.”

I also think that it is fully possible to do other things to reform the state. But this is not the reform wanted by the country’s élites, the minimal state. Anyone who wants to improve education without outsourcing it has to provide more teachers and more administrators. You cannot hope to improve education by outsourcing it, unless you are only concerned with improving it for a small élite. If you really want to give everybody access to university or technical college, you have to recruit more teachers and more administrative staff.

And if you want to improve health provision, you have to have more doctors. Whom can you fire to cut costs as the neoliberals want you to? If you want to make the Federal Police more efficient, you have to take on more staff. If you want the federal income tax service to become more effective, you will have to take on more people. We have border posts that are unmanned. When I told Guido, “We need more border guards,” he replied that we did not have civil servants we could transfer there.

So the machinery of government will become more efficient to the extent that it gets more (and more competent) staff to fill all its posts: otherwise, we are going nowhere. But I have one reservation. I was quite surprised at the quality of the people we have in public administration—people who are very competent but who all too often leave us because we pay them so little. They have now had a pay increase but without any raise for the most qualified. And without them, the machinery just cannot function.

What do you regret most about these past 10 years?

If there is any citizen who can have no regrets about the past 10 years, it is I.