From Dictatorship to the Brazilian New Republic in Crisis: Understanding Lula’s Political Leadership

Abstract

P olitical biography is said to be "the disciplinary poor relation to the study of political science more generally," and few would agree that, without biography, the discipline risks being "'a form of taxidermy" (Arklay 2006, 17, 15). Thus, it's an honor that LAPS editors Alfred Montero and Juan Pablo Luna judged my biography worthy of a roundtable with stimulating commentaries by political scientists whose work I admire and have long relied on.If every biography, like every good picture, is a portrait of two persons-the writer and the subject-it makes sense to begin with a few words about myself as a Brazilian labor historian who has published on industrial and labor relatons, electoral politics, and working-class women (Koss 1973, 713). In exploring Lula's origin, roots, and evolution, the book lays out how his practice of leadership and distinctive discourse emerged in 1978, on the eve of the metalworker strikes, and carried through his subsequent rise from strike leader and radical politician to president and world statesman. WHY BIOGRAPHY AND WHAT'S THE STORY?The extraordinary strikes in the Sāo Paulo industrial region known as ABC generated an abundance of journalistic coverage and documentation and a large and variegated body of social science research. Despite its enormous strengths, the rich academic production shied away from sustained analysis of the icon of those strikes. Curiously enough, Lula's particular role(s) and contribution(s) were also slighted in the vast literature on the New Unionism, the PT, and even his presidential campaigns, which focus on party strategy and platforms, internal ideological disputes, public opinion polling, political advertising, and voting patterns. Were it not for a handful of journalistic books on several of Lula's presidential races, we would know even less about his strengths and weaknesses during grueling campaigns-both his own and on behalf of others-that involved hundreds of thousands of activists over the four decades he has commanded the Workers' Party (PT) he founded in 1979.