It was also a personal blow to Lula, who suddenly had a great emptiness in his life. His union was no longer under state intervention and he had handed it over to Meneghelli. He had lost the election, which he had persuaded himself he had a chance of winning. He would wake up in the morning with nothing much to do. In fact, he returned to the Metalworkers' Union of São Bernardo, becoming a director on Meneghelli's executive committee. At the same time, he retained his position as president of the PT's national committee.
The following year, Lula promoted a solidarity strike in the ABC zone that led to another intervention in his union. In July 1983, his old friends the petroleum workers of Campinas launched a strike in protest against a military decree-law that reduced the rights of employees of state enterprises; they shut down the refinery at Paulínia, responsible for a third of the country's gasoline. Lula, who was not even a delegate to the Metalworkers' Congress at Piracicaba, made an off-the-cuff speech urging that the metalworkers should go on strike in solidarity. The congress was suspended, and Lula went off to Campinas in such a hurry to tell the Campinas workers the news that he left Marisa behind. Meneghelli had difficulty taking control of the strike, and once again the Ministry of Labor took over the union.
The conflict rapidly escalated. The government had already taken over the union of petroleum workers of Campinas and Paulínia, throwing out its president, Jacó Bittar, who was also secretary-general of the PT. Workers throughout the country decided to hold a national strike on 21 July, in protest against the government's economic policy and its willingness to negotiate spending cuts with the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
The strike was particularly effective in São Paulo, Rio Grande do Sul, Pernambuco, and Rio de Janeiro, but the government stopped some of the action by mobilizing military police in every state. The repression was violent, with police detaining and beating up workers. Workers in São Bernardo who had tried to take refuge in the cathedral were pulled out by armed police in spite of the protests of Bishop Hummes.
Lula was attacked by some for being irresponsible, and his union did not get its building back for a year. But he argued that, because solidarity strikes were still illegal, it was important that workers should show support for one another if they were to build a strong, autonomous movement. He was also in tune with most of organized labor in criticizing an IMF economic policy that led to cuts in public spending and worsened the recession. The events demonstrated that, even without a prominent role in the union, Lula himself could still sway opinion.
In the PT there was also an organizational development of significance. Lula was rarely interested in organizational matters, but the setting up of the “Articulaçao of 113”—a pressure group initially composed of 113 people—was designed to bring discipline to the party. It became the dominant faction in the PT into the 1990s, and a key player was José Dirceu, a former student leader who had gone to Cuba after the kidnap exchange and then returned to Brazil in disguise. He fully appreciated the importance of party structuring.
But Lula himself had found a new cause—the campaign for direct elections for the presidency. Some Marxists in the PT thought little of bourgeois democracy, but the Articulaçao and Lula saw this as a way of mobilizing support. The PT was the first major party to throw its weight behind the campaign and, at a meeting in the Rio governor's mansion on 25 June 1983—just prior to Lula's solidarity struggle alongside the petroleum workers—Lula, Leonel Brizola, and Franco Montoro agreed to work together for “Diretas Já,” direct elections now. Significantly, this brought the PMDB, the PDT, and the PT together. Huge demonstrations took place in the main cities in 1984—eight hundred thousand in Candelária, in the center of Rio de Janeiro, and 1.4 million in the valley of Anhangabaú, São Paulo.
Brazil had not seen anything like it. Newspapers such as the Globo group, based in Rio, and Folha de São Paulo, both of which had attacked Lula in 1982, backed the movement. Lula, breathing the oxygen of publicity again, was a star speaker at rallies. Any speaker who seemed at all hesitant in backing direct elections for the presidency was booed.
The constitutional amendment, put forward by a young PMDB congressman from Mato Grosso, Dante de Oliveira, was due to be voted on 25 April 1984.15 Such was the tension in the country that President Figueiredo declared a state of emergency in Brasília and neighboring municipalities of Goiás six days in advance of the scheduled vote; TV stations were prohibited from covering the voting; and six thousand troops occupied the heart of the city on the day of the vote. The troops were led by General Newton Cruz, mounted on a white horse, who tried to stop motorists from honking their horns to show their support for Diretas Já.
The constitutional amendment needed a two-thirds majority, which it just failed to reach. Although 298 deputies voted in favor, with only 65 against and 3 abstentions, the amendment's passage was stymied by the absence of 112 parliamentarians. In effect, the absentees won. This meant that the regime's attempt to keep the transfer to a civilian president within a system of indirect election, which it had a better chance to control, had succeeded.
This was to overlook the wily skills of the Brazilian political class, however. Although Lula and the PT were strongly critical of this class—its elasticity of principle, its elite proclivities, and its self-enrichment—its sense of public opinion had survived the two decades of dictatorship. Elected politicians realized that it was time for a change. The PMDB put together a “Democratic Alliance” with a breakaway group of progovernment congressmen and launched a campaign to elect the PMDB governor of Minas Gerais, Tancredo Neves, as president. The formerly progovernment José Sarney, now in the PMDB, was his running mate. Once again there were huge public demonstrations.
While the PCdoB joined the pro-Tancredo demonstrations, the PT leadership was adamant: there had to be direct elections, there had to be a constitutional convention, and this was just a “conservative transition.” Lula was vitriolic. He said that the election of Tancredo would not mean the end of the dictatorship and the military regime. There would still be an authoritarian regime, which would try to persuade Brazilians to forget the crimes of the previous twenty years. PT members were consulted directly. They were asked to vote on three options—whether their deputies should support Tancredo against the “fascist” Paulo Maluf,16 whether they should back Tancredo after reaching an agreement on a program of interest to workers, or whether they should boycott the process.
Although only 7 percent of party members took part in the internal referendum, they voted overwhelmingly to boycott the process. In January 1985, however, Tancredo and Sarney were elected by Congress with 480 votes; three out of the eight PT deputies, including the film actress Beth Mendes, voted for them and had to leave the party. Tancredo, a subtle politician, appointed an old friend of Lula as his minister of labor. He was Almir Pazzianoto, a labor lawyer who had represented the São Bernardo Metalworkers. In a tragedy that moved the country, however, Tancredo was taken to the hospital on the eve of his inauguration, and he died on 21 April. He was succeeded as president by José Sarney.
In May, the Congress finally reestablished direct elections for the presidency, giving twenty million illiterates the right to vote—something they had not enjoyed prior to 1964—and legalizing all political parties. It also called for a constitutional assembly. Although this was not precisely the format called for by the PT, and Sarney's conduct of the presidency was probably more conservative than Tancredo's would have been had he lived, these measures together meant that the military era was over.
The political changes that led to the establishment of the “New Republic” in 1985 were paralleled by important changes in the economy and the organized labor movement. The early 1980s saw a downturn in the Brazilian economy. In mid-1981, more than nine hundred thousand people lost their jobs in the six major metropolitan areas of Brazil, and by August of that year unemployment in those cities was estimated at two million.17 The government was also greatly concerned by the growth of Brazil's indebtedness and was encouraging state enterprises to borrow internationally to offset the deficit in the balance of payments. There were constant liquidity crises in 1982