Recently a young Turkish student at the University of California in Berkeley told me that she wore a Workers Party (PT) campaign button during the year 2002. Never having visited Brazil, she was nonetheless rooting for Lula's election. Like her, millions of young people were cheering for the election of a leftwing president in Brazil.

Since 30 months have now passed, we of the PT are in debt to young people worldwide who dreamed of a possible alternative to the single way of thinking and to neoliberal globalization. That debt stems from various others.

The greatest debt is owed to the Brazilian poor. Brazil is a divided country, home to the greatest income concentration in the world and to a model of apartation, Brazilian social apartheid. In these 30 months the Brazilian government has not presented a program to abolish social exclusion and make Brazil an integrated nation. This was perfectly possible.

A revolution in education, a distributive fiscal and budgetary system, a set of laws incorporating the excluded into the rights of citizenship would have permitted a revolution-of-good-sense. The Brazilian public sector revenue would permit these actions without any breach of the pillars of economic policy.

Lula had the credibility to ask for sacrifices from the wealthy sector of Brazilian society and he had the arguments to show that this change would be a positive one for all classes. We lost the chance to demonstrate to the world that it is possible to have globalization without exclusion. We did nothing to shake ourselves free of the international-champion-of-income-concentration title.

What impeded us from forming an alternative was the mindset that the market allied with government-assistance measures will reduce poverty. Poverty continued to be seen as a matter of private economics and not of public policies.

As a consequence, we stopped offering any other option to the economic model that we inherited. The financial and economic limits and the hobbles imposed by the worldwide reality certainly impeded great changes in the economic model.

The Lula government inherited an economy in crisis, aggravated by the international and domestic fear of what actions the government might take. It was necessary to calm the market, acquire confidence, change little. But it was also necessary to indicate that we would make changes in the future.

The world was expecting this of the PT, just as we demanded it of the previous administrations. We had ideas and proposals. We did not have the right to continue the same course forever. That continuity is yet another debt.

Another debt was the failure to transform Brazil into a seedbed of debate for new ideas. While in the opposition, the PT organized the World Social Forum; once in office, it turned inward with the arrogant, know-it-all attitude that, for lack of an alternative, the road to take was that of doing nothing new.

Within the PT, a majority bloc assumed control, enclosed Lula with its acquiescence and impeded internal debate. The critics were dismissed from the government, isolated and threatened with expulsion. Lula's Brazil turned into a debate-free zone.

Since the criticism that previously came from the PT and the social movements has disappeared, the tendency towards only one way of thinking is stronger than ever. Intimidated, the earlier critics lost their voice.

The practice of government demoralized alternative proposals and the opposition did not need to elaborate its ideas since the Lula government had adopted them.

The fear of debate and the arrogance of power impeded the Lula government from innovating democracy. The PT created the participatory budget but its government made no gesture to democratize political action.

On the contrary, it keeps the Brazilian people and the party cadres away from the decision-making process, controls opinions within the party, manipulates through public relations, and, what is worse, it permitted the suspicion to arise that it had conducted shameful vote buying of opposition Congress members.

The Lula government and the PT are in debt because they have not used innovative instruments in democratic practices, as was done in the state and municipal government offices we held and as we called upon the federal government to do.

Without democracy and without transparency we are, to everyone's surprise, in debt due to the image of corruption that the government and the party are experiencing.

Independently of the conclusions of the commissions investigating the denunciations, the government stopped adopting ethical postures in public life, or adopting measures to increase transparency, financial oversight and punishment of the deviations within the governments.

Dispensing with preventive measures, it believed that, because it was the PT, it would be free of corruption. It thus lost the chance to make a definitive transformation in the practice of Brazilian politics. It acquired an additional debt.

With no exciting ideas and with no political debate, neither was there any different treatment of environmental issues. Everyone thought that the Lula government would show the world that we are capable of caring for the Amazon, of combining economic growth with environmental protection.

A new model of sustainable development was expected of a Brazil with an Amazonian patrimony and a Left government. Instead of this, we need to excuse ourselves for the speed of the deforestation and environmental degradation; we are indebted to the world.

We did not make a leap forward in the agrarian reform; we did not put an end to rural violence. Brazil is perpetuating the same property structure, now aggravated by the agribusiness incentive. It is doing this with neither social control (of the relations with the local population) nor ecological control (of the impact upon the environment).

All these debts have one reason. The PT's discourse never was affirmed as a clear, alternative, all-encompassing proposal seeking a new society and a different future for Brazil. We never had a greater Cause; we were always an umbrella of corporativist demands and a tribune for anti-capitalist speeches.

When we had to make concessions to arrive in government, we did not maintain our principles because we had no clear objectives. The lack of an ideological stamp was aggravated by the arrogance of the nucleus that installed itself in power; and by Lula's position, acting like a president of honor who was unifying and not like a leader who leads.

The PT arrived in power without a Cause, a program; without undergoing a process of recycling as did the European Left parties before arriving in power; and without formulating a program of the Left.

All we had was the discourse; to govern, it was necessary to abandon it with no time to replace it. We did not invent PTism. That was our major debt and the cause of all the others.

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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