In 1979, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva—then president of Brazil’s ABC Metalworkers Union—came to the placid town of Poços de Caldas, in the southern state of Minas Gerais, to lay the first brick for what would become his political cathedral: the Workers’ Party (PT). The PT would go on to be one of the most important political forces in Brazilian politics.
This article has been adapted from Lula: A Biography by Fernando Moraes, trans. Brian Mier, (Verso, 320 pp., $27.96, August 2024).
Brazil’s Superior Electoral Court legally recognized the PT as a political party on Sept. 11, 1982, in the final years of the country’s military dictatorship. The traditional narrative holds that the PT was born in the auditorium of a Catholic high school in São Paulo on Feb. 10, 1980, where a famous photo of Lula—flanked by a group of renowned intellectuals, a famous actress, and a former revolutionary combatant—was taken. But only union members were present on the day the party was really founded: July 7, 1979, in the imposing neoclassical halls of the Hotel Palace in Poços de Caldas.
The fact that the PT was founded by union representatives before being presented to other sectors of the Brazilian left is key to understanding the central role organized labor continues to play in the party today. Unlike other labor parties around the world, which have long distanced themselves from the union movement, many of the most important figures in the PT, including Lula and hundreds of elected officials, are former union leaders.
Lula speaks to a giant crowd in São Bernardo do Campo, Brazil, in 1989. Antonio Ribeiro/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images
During the 1970s, Lula transformed from a person who said that he “hated politics and whoever likes politics” into an important political actor. He was shocked at the near-total absence of anyone from the working class in Congress; there were only two working class people—both from São Paulo—among nearly 500 senators and congressmen. The lack of representation bothered Lula and became a recurring theme at all of the debates, union meetings, and congresses in which he participated.
Whenever Lula was invited to talk about salaries, inflation, or unemployment in those forums, he would beat around the bush until finally reaching his main point: One of the reasons Brazilians were so poor was the working class’s nearly nonexistent participation in the spaces where the laws governing the country were made.
Prior to their arrival in Poços de Caldas, Lula and his allies from the ABC had spent months talking about creating a political party with true working-class roots. Critical to its evolution was São Paulo’s Ninth State Congress of Metalworkers, Mechanics, and Electrical Workers, held in January 1979 in the upstate town of Lins.
Although Lins wasn’t an industrial center, the town was chosen to host the event because of its mayor, the engineer Waldemar Casadei. Casadei was a member of the “authentic,” or left-leaning, group within the Brazilian Democratic Movement (MDB)—the only opposition party that the military dictatorship allowed to operate. Although some members of the authentic caucus were reluctant, Casadei was enthusiastic about the idea of creating a new workers party.
On the weekend before the meeting in Poços de Caldas, Lula and another dozen metalworkers set up what would be known as “the Pampas meeting,” named after the Pampas Hotel in São Bernardo do Campo, where it was hosted. The hotel’s brutalist cylindrical concrete building buzzed with excitement. The new party’s foundations had solidified among workers during the meeting in Lins; the Pampas meeting was called to measure left-wing parliamentarians’ interest in the project.
The meeting was originally planned to be closed to the public. However, when work began on that Saturday morning, Lula and the union leaders who had decided to create the party realized that there were nearly 200 people in the auditorium, all under the watchful eye of reporters from four of the largest national newspapers at the time, São Paulo’s Folha and Estadão, and Rio de Janeiro’s Jornal do Brasil and O Globo.
All the factions that would go on to make up the PT were present: union activists, intellectuals, representatives of the Catholic Church, and former exiles, many of whom had belonged to armed resistance groups and the MDB.
Representatives of all three internal caucuses of the MDB were in attendance that weekend in São Bernardo—but they failed to reach a consensus about creating the new party. Although there were politicians from São Paulo who had already decided to join the PT, some authentics opposed the idea of creating the PT because they believed that the new party would rip apart the MDB’s broad front, benefiting the military dictatorship. All of this took place in the presence of dozens of union leaders who treated creation of the PT as a done deal.
Meanwhile, there was an impression among the artists and intellectuals at the meeting that their support for creating the PT was nearly unanimous. The first person from the academic world to join the party was art critic Mário Pedrosa. Pedroso had been kicked out of the Brazilian Communist Party in 1931 after being accused of being a Trotskyist.
Lula is lifted by metalworker colleagues after a union rally in São Bernardo do Campo on March 22, 1979. Claudinei Petroli/AFP via Getty Images
Pedrosa didn’t just endorse the PT’s creation, but he became a propagandist for what he considered to be “something that has never existed in Brazil, workers building their own party.” Fascinated by the prospect of something so revolutionary, he worked to recruit other intellectuals. His first target was an old comrade from the Democratic Left and the Socialist Party of the 1940s, the renowned sociologist and literary historian Antônio Cândido.
Cândido was reluctant, saying that he didn’t want anything to do with political parties. Furthermore, he added, he had heard rumors that Lula was going to place restrictions on the participation of intellectuals and students in party leadership and complained that “these people just want to manipulate and use us.”
Pedroso didn’t back down. “Cândido, since Lenin, political parties have always been created by intellectuals,” Pedrosa said. “For the first time, someone, Lula in this case, wants to join both workers and intellectuals. The party will need people like us, at least as sympathizers.”
Although he wasn’t immediately able to win Cândido over, Pedrosa’s arguments would soon cause Cândido to reimmerse himself in what he considered to be “the annoyance of partisan politics.”
A few weeks after his conversation with Pedrosa, Cândido and his wife, Gilda, visited an old friend, the Polish doctor Febus Gikovate. Like Pedrosa, Gikovate was a former comrade from the Democratic Left and had been an activist in the Revolutionary Socialist Party, a Trotskyist group. Suffering from cancer, Gikovate was hospitalized in Santa Casa de Misericórdia, whose medical school he had worked at as a professor.
Before entering his room, Cândido and Gilda spoke quickly with Gikovate’s wife, who complained about her husband’s suffering. “See if you can try to cheer him up,” she said. “He is very depressed about his illness.”
Cândido whispered to Gilda, “I know this isn’t right, but I am going to make up a lie to try to raise his spirits.”
The couple entered the room smiling, and Cândido said, “Boss! I didn’t come here just to visit you. I’m here to perform a political task. It’s a delicate mission.”
Febus’s eyes lit up. “What is it?”
“The workers of the ABC are trying to found a party, and they’ve invited us to participate in their meetings. I don’t know if I am going to go, because I don’t want to participate in party politics anymore,” Cândido said.
Read More
Lula Doesn’t Understand Today’s Brazil
How the Brazilian left has become a victim of its own success.
Gikovate’s expression grew serious. “These workers are trying to do what we wanted to do when we were their age but never succeeded at: They are founding a party. It is our obligation to join it.”
Lying in his hospital bed, the old Trotskyist wiped the smile from his old friend’s face. “I can’t go because of my health. But I am asking you to go to represent me. Tell them that I can’t join the party, or even go to any meeting, because I am going somewhere else.”
Cândido became emotional. “Febus, don’t say that…”
“No, Cândido. I am dying. The end is near. I hope that I can hold out a little more, and your company is comforting. But go to this meeting and sign your membership form as if it were mine,” Gikovate insisted.
Three decades later, remembering that episode, Cândido said, “Febus died the next day. That is when I told myself that I had to join this new party. That is what caused me to join the PT. I joined knowing that the PT wasn’t a socialist party, and I am a socialist. I think that the PT has a workers’ energy that gets confused with the real interests of the people.”
The PT chose Apolônio de Carvalho, a historic revolutionary fighter, to be its first official member. Carvalho was a symbolic pick—a hero of the French Resistance and the Internationalist Brigades who fought against Francisco Franco in the Spanish Civil War. But the PT became a magnet for intellectuals of the caliber of Cândido and Pedrosa too, including Florestan Fernandes, Paulo Freire, and Marilena de Souza Chaui, among many others.
When Lula finally closed the meeting in the Pampas Palace Hotel, it marked the end of a long and tortuous gestation period. Then he left the politicians, artists, and activists behind and drove 300 kilometers to Poços de Caldas to oversee the birth of the Workers’ Party.
Workers of the state-owned Petrobras greet Lula during his visit to a plant in Canoas, Brazil, on July 28, 2005. Jefferson Bernardes/AFP via Getty Images
On Feb. 10, 1980, the PT was formally introduced to the Brazilian people in the auditorium of a São Paulo high school. The dictatorship ended in 1985.
In democratic Brazil, the PT has become the country’s oldest continually operating political party. It has won five presidential elections, including three by Lula, who returned to the presidency in 2023, and has elected thousands to national, state, and local offices. But because the country has 29 political parties, the PT has never been able to hold a majority in Congress. To operate in this environment, the party has sometimes had to forge awkward alliances with other political groups.
After 45 years of seemingly insurmountable obstacles, however, the PT is still built on the same three pillars that founded it: labor unions, progressive intellectuals, and social movements connected to liberation theology groups in the Catholic Church. To this day, the majority of its elected officials started their activism in these three fields. This has shaped modern Brazil by opening once elite-dominated segments of society like university education to the working-class majority. For example, the percentage of working class Afro-Brazilian university students increased from 10 percent in 2001, the year before PT first took power, to 52 percent today.
Although it has faced challenges, the PT remains the largest party in the Western Hemisphere that was founded by organized sectors of the working class. And despite the compromises inherent in coalition politics, the party continues to work to prioritize this segment of the population wherever and whenever possible.
Books are independently selected by FP editors. FP earns an affiliate commission on anything purchased through links to Amazon.com on this page.