Perhaps never before in the history of Brazil have persons with such respectable biographies been united into a single party: President Lula, former Cabinet Chief José Dirceu and former President of the Workers Party José Genoíno are names that will go down in the history of the country.

Together they built the Workers Party (PT), a party occupying a special place in Brazilian history. The present crisis threatens their biographies as much as it does the party itself. It threatens, therefore, our national heritage.

There are crises administrated by the governments and crises that dominate the governments, administrating them. The latter are not resolved within the very same logic that created them; they demand a rupture with their causes and a hard look ahead, a look beyond the crisis itself.

Beyond the mandate. In the case of the government and of President Lula, the way out of the crisis does not lie in administrating it. It must be seen in its historical perspective, breaking with its central causes: the promiscuous relationship between politics and money in the electoral processes as well as in the exercise of power; and the institution of reelection.

Lula can maintain his biography if he sends the Congress a Constitutional Reform project abolishing reelection and, at the same time, declaring that he will set an example by renouncing his right to be a candidate for reelection in 2006.

Beyond this, the President must use the months remaining in his term to win the approval of a Political Reform that will impede and punish acts of corruption.

Beyond the economy. The PT government matured in its treatment of the economy. It understood that there is no economics of the Right or the Left; there is merely an economy that is responsible or irresponsible, competent or incompetent.

But it did not understand that the government must go beyond economics, that the problems of poverty are not solved through economic growth but, rather, through public policies that will change the social reality by abolishing poverty, distributing income, educating the entire population.

Beyond São Paulo. To go beyond the economy, the PT needs to go beyond São Paulo. It cannot continue looking at Brazil from high atop the office buildings on Avenida Paulista, or from the factory floors of the São Paulo industrial belt of Santo André, São Bernardo do Campo and São Caetano (ABC). The reality in Brazil and the needs of the Brazilian people are much more than the usual banners flown by the modern sector of the economy.

Beyond the workers. The PT emerged linked to the union movement and remained imprisoned in the professional categories of the modern sector of the economy; in other words, it engaged in corporativism. That vision made the government act as if, instead of changing Brazil for everyone, its role was to listen to each group of society.

It lost its commitment to change and worked with the objective of meeting demands. The PT will not find its way out of the crisis without going beyond the workers and transforming itself into a party of all the people.

Beyond the tendencies. It is not possible to build a party that refuses to be a party, preferring to remain divided into tendencies, like subparties, without a central, unifying idea.

The present moral crisis stems principally from a lack of ideology, which transforms the militant committed to change Brazil into a militant committed merely to the present, to his or her own group.

Beyond ethics. More than setting rigid rules for the ethical behavior of its leaders, the PT has to be equally rigid in putting the mark of ethics upon the social priorities that its governments will carry out.

Only by looking beyond the crisis, engaging in self-criticism, seeking the causes of the crisis in the past and thinking of the future beyond the crisis, will the PT be able to overcome it, recuperate the biographies and rebuild the party.

The country needs the PT's symbols and political instruments for its social transformation, to complete its Republic and its Abolition, socialize its development. That is the challenge that the militancy of the Left in Brazil is facing today, caught somewhere between frustration and anguish.

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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