The Workers Party (PT) has 48 mayors in Rio Grande do Sul state, including the three major cities, and over 350 municipal councilors. In November 1998, the party extended its organized presence from 320 to over 400 of the state’s 427 municipalities.

The PT is the leading force in the Popular Front, which also includes the left-nationalist PDT, the Socialist Party, and the (formerly pro-Albanian) Communist Party of Brazil (PCdB). The PT has 12 of the Popular Front’s 20 seats in the 55-member State Assembly.

The party’s membership is mainly working class and rural poor. The PT is also the preferred party of teachers, civil servants, the liberal professions, and all the lower-middle class sectors which have been pauperized under the neo-liberal administrations. [Since Brazil emerged from a military dictatorship in the late 1970s and early ‘80s, it has been ruled by civilian governments promoting “neo-liberal” policies.]

Women make up half the PT membership, though they are under-represented in the party hierarchy.

The party cadre are largely from the generation, aged 35 plus, that entered politics in their late teens in the student and labor struggles against the military dictatorship. The average age of the PT membership and leadership increased sharply during the 1990s, partly because the student movement is fragmented and no longer plays the same vanguard role as in the 1970s and early ’80s.

Although young people faced no future under Rio Grande’s previous neo-liberal government, few saw the PT as offering an alternative program relevant for them. This changed with the 1998 election campaign, in which the PT again spoke more clearly to young people.

The party as a whole has no statistics on youth membership, but the radical left Socialist Democracy current recruited some 150 young members during and after the November 1998 election campaign. This reflects not only the growing attraction of the PT among young people, but the migration of young people to the left of the party.

Rapid growth poses a major challenge to the party. According to Organization Secretary Inacio Fritzen, “After 10 years of rapid growth, the party is struggling to integrate its newer members, who do not share the experience of the founder generation. But our challenge is not only to integrate and consolidate. We also need to make the party more organic, and more integrated. All members must have a forum where they can genuinely participate. At the moment, those who do not have a specific function in the party can only participate in congresses and election campaigns — though in Brazil we do have major elections every two years! So we face a major, new challenge in translating social resistance into organic forms of expression, in which each militant will intervene.”

Isolation

The Rio Grande PT has always been dominated by the left, which is a minority in the national party. This tradition of radicalism has played a major role in the party’s success in Rio Grande. This was the first state where the party introduced proportional representation of tendencies in the election of party bodies. While the national PT has tried to build a coalition with center-left and center-right bourgeois parties, the Rio Grande party has only co-operated with anti-bourgeois parties.

According to Lucio Costa, Secretary of Communication at the Rio Grande do Sul PT, the strength and confidence of the Rio Grande party makes it almost impossible for the national leadership of the PT to intervene against them. In any case, the local supporters of the PT’s moderate national leaders are discredited because of their nonparticipation in local party campaigns.

The rapid consolidation of a PT base in Rio Grande do Sul state means that the local party could play a growing role within the national party. This influence is already present in the current protests against the government’s economic policies, and is expected to increase in the run-up to the PT’s national congress in November 1999. The success of the PT in Rio Grande do Sul contrasts sharply with the party’s decline in those states where the party leadership has imposed moderate policies and failed to mobilize the party base and social movements.