PT Never Again? Failure (and Success) in the PT’s State Government in Espírito Santo and the Federal District
(with Fiona Macaulay) RADICALS IN POWER: THE WORKERS’ PARTY (PT) AND EXPERIMENTS IN URBAN DEMOCRACY (ZED BOOKS)
The Workers’ Party (PT) experiences in local administration have not always been happy; indeed, on occasion they have been bitter and traumatic. The modo petista de governar, the party’s synthesis of good practice and approaches to govenrment (Bittar 1992; Nylen 1997, Pozzobon 1998), has been successfully implemented in many PT-run cities and state governments, awakening international interest in the PT’s particular brand of participatory democracy and public policies directed at helping the poor. However, some PT governments have ended in acrimony, with poor public approval ratings and disappointing results in terms of social policy. This chapter focuses on one notorious case of failure, that f the state government of Espirito Santo under Vitor Buaiz, who was in office between 1995 and 1998, and contrasts it with an acclaimed case of success, the government of Cristovam Buarque in the Federal District (DF) of Brasilia during the same period. For many petistas, the Vitor Buaiz administration was an object lesson in how not to govern. The experience was traumatic, with the governor leaving the PT in the middle of the term and then retiring from frontline politics. The PT in this state has yet to recover its credibility and confidence. The embarrassing collapse of the capixaba PT has been ignored by the party and has not been the subject of analysis, either inside or outside the party, unlike other some of its early municipal administrations, such as those in Diadema, Fortaleza, Campinas and Sao Paulo where the party also faced serious disunity and unpopularity (Azevedo, C. B. 1995; Couto 1995; Keck 1992b; Macaulay 1996; Marcondes 1991a; Pinto 1992; Simoes 1992). The Buarque administration, on the other hand, has attracted widespread positive attention chiefly for its innovative social policies, such as the Bolsa-Escola, or ‘School-Scholarship’ project, a programme that provides a family income to keep children in school.
