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Dilma Rousseff of the Workers Party (PT) won Brazil's presidential election on October 26, meaning that when her term ends her party will have held the nation's top office for a remarkable 16 years, longer than any party in Brazilian history. Rousseff began as part of an armed revolutionary guerrilla organization during the dictatorship from 1964-85, then helped found the Democratic Workers Party (PDT), and only joined the PT in 2001. The PT of the 1980s and 1990s represented the political expression of militant labor and social movements tending toward socialism, yet today the PT is the establishment. Now others are attempting to build a new revolutionary movement to its left.
Tremendous opposition to Brazil's PT establishment has come from both left and right, as seen in the June 2013 demonstrations that swept the country. And in the October 2014 elections, both the left and especially the right grew as a result. The more conservative Brazilian Social Democratic Party (PSDB) succeeded in harvesting much of the discontent that expressed itself in the tremendous demonstrations of June 2013, other right-wing parties have also grown, and a number of far-right candidates have been elected. Thus we see a polarization of Brazilian society with gains for both the far right and the far left.
On the left, the Party of Socialism and Freedom (PSOL) proved most successful, especially in Rio de Janeiro where it emerged as a real electoral force to the left of the PT. There are also at least two other important far-left parties, the United Socialist Workers Party (PSTU) and the Brazilian Communist Party (PCB), though they are both less-significant electoral forces, the former having received 188,473 votes and the latter 66,615 votes in the recent national election. The PSTU is a more important force in the labor unions, while PSOL has deeper roots in other social movements. There have been proposals for electoral fronts of all three parties in the past, but in 2010 and 2014 PSOL was not an attractive electoral ally because it was too weak, so PSTU ran its own candidates. With PSOL's strength in this election, a left electoral front is more likely, as has already happened in some states.
We look here at the PT's almost 12 years in...