It appears that the Workers Party (PT) has suddenly died. That sentence, however, contains two untruths: it did not happen suddenly and the party has not yet died. A party with a 25-year history of struggle, dreams, combativeness - plus 800 thousand militants spread over the country - does not die suddenly.

But the militants are perplexed and ashamed, and that can lead to the death of the party. Especially if they do not see that the crisis clearly goes deeper than the denunciations of one deputy.

The crisis has roots in the history of the PT and the behavior of the government. It was not imported; we created it. The denunciations merely hastened the outcrop of a crisis already existing.

The PT was born contesting. It opposed the military regime, the system, the models, but it did not have a clear banner for the future.

It was a gathering of social movements, unions, and Left groups, all of them unhappy and unaccommodating with the dictatorship, with capitalism and with the traditional socialist Utopias.

It neither proposed socialism nor accepted capitalism. It was not the bearer of a new Utopia.

It grew up divided. Lacking a uniting banner, the PT divided into tendencies in order to survive.

Lula's ethical posture and figure united them, but there was no common project. Divided into groups, the PT did not know unification.

It fortified itself by making demands. The speeches of its various tendencies generated demands that did not form a program.

Contrary to the parties organized around a project for society, the PT fortified itself as an umbrella of corporatist demands that, taken as a whole, could not be met.

It was an umbrella that, once in power, would be insufficient to fulfill all the promises.

Its vision developed from the center. Born in the São Paulo industrial belt of Santo André, São Bernardo do Campo and São Caetano (ABC), led by unions, with a vision based upon demands, the PT was incapable of distinguishing Brazil in all its complexity.

It saw the future as a continuation of the old, concentrating, national model, which demands merely a better distribution of profit and salary for those who are employed.

It revealed a new side of the same axis, between capital and labor, without including the excluded or inventing a different future. It sees Brazil as an assemblage of São Paulo satellite-states.

It won due to the crisis. The PT and Lula represented the last hope after more than one hundred years of the Republic led by a privileged minority that built a divided, sick society and not a nation.

Lula's election as President was not the victory of the best proposal for the country; it was the failure of the other parties and leaders.

It matured accommodating. With a corporatist origin, a regionalist slant and a vision more economic than social, the PT government stopped carrying out programs to transform Brazilian society.

It did not define its legacy. From the point of view of its proposals, it made itself equal to the forces it had previously combated.

It lost itself in arrogance. Without a legacy of its own, without a uniting banner, imprisoned by a São Paulo regional group, the PT government lost itself in the practice of arrogant, isolated politics.

The central nucleus of power thought itself above all suspicion and, therefore, free to scorn dialogue and relax its hold on ethics.

It closed itself off in a restricted group and wasted energy in disputes within a single state and without a national perspective.

It entered into a marriage of convenience. Lacking a plan for a different Brazil, it aligned itself to interests that would guarantee reelection. It was the victim of reelection.

Since his first day in office, Lula has been obliged to be a candidate instead of a president. Because of this, he formed risky alliances and was treated by the opposition as just another candidate, not as the leader, the Chief of State, the representative of all Brazilians.

The PT aged through incoherence. Unyielding to criticism, it refused to recognize its weaknesses. It preferred to justify its faults by affirming that the other parties did the same thing in the past.

From the point of view of ethics, it lowered itself to their level and lost its reason for existing. It tried to rebut, instead of absorbing, the criticism of adversaries and the suggestions of allies.

But it did not die. Beyond its leadership there is a militancy that is unhappy but still coherent, engaged, confident of the possibility of heading in a new direction.

Because of this, the PT needs to admit that the crisis is one of the party and its government, its history, its practice when in power. It cannot blame the opposition.

It also needs to liberate hope from the closed nucleus controlling it, discover the vast, real Brazil, vice-champion of exclusion, and the necessity of reorienting its future, completing the abolition and the Republic.

If it does this, the PT will have the chance to define clear, transformative propositions, drawing rigid rules for the ethical behavior of its militants, especially those occupying government posts.

But this is not the task of its present leaders alone. Only an awakening of the militancy will impede the PT's death foretold, guaranteeing the formulation of a common project to change Brazil and the rescue of its dreams, its combativeness and its ethical behavior.

Cristovam Buarque has a Ph.D. in economics. He is a PT senator for the Federal District and was Governor of the Federal District (1995-98) and Minister of Education (2003-04). You can visit his homepage - www.cristovam.com.br - and write to him at cristovam@senador.gov.br.

Translated from the Portuguese by Linda Jerome - LinJerome@cs.com.

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