Interview by Andrea Califano

After thirteen years of Workers’ Party (PT) government, the last two years have witnessed Brazil sink into deepening economic and institutional crisis. In 2016 an “institutional coup” against PT president Dilma Rousseff saw the establishment of a new government under conservative lawyer Michel Temer, her own former vice-president.

Fresh elections are taking place today. Former president Lula da Silva, jailed earlier this year, had hoped to run again and had a strong lead in opinion polls. But he has been barred from running, and the PT is instead fielding Fernando Haddad. Haddad currently trails the “Brazilian Trump,” the far-right former army officer Jair Messias Bolsonaro, in what threatens to be a fresh electoral shock.

The stakes are extremely high, at a moment when it cannot even be assumed that there is any peaceful way out of the crisis. In recent months, violence has exploded in several cities and regions, and there is an ever more imposing army presence in the streets.

This intense political conflict also takes place against the backdrop of a much deeper malaise: the discrediting of institutions, the worsening of living standards, and cuts in public services and the welfare state. The left-wing candidates in the race, ranging from the Socialism and Freedom Party (PSOL) to the PT and the Democratic Labour Party (PDT), are all proposing different answers to this situation, based on different evaluations of Lula and Rousseff’s records in office.

Andrea Califano of the Fondazione Feltrinelli spoke to three economists about Brazil’s way out of this dramatic situation. The interviewees are Laura Carvalho, economics professor at São Paulo University (who took part in writing the economic component of PSOL’s program, though is not herself part of the party); Marcio Pochmann, an economics professor at Campinas University, a parliamentary candidate for the PT and one of the three coordinators of Haddad’s program; and Nelson Marconi, coordinator of PDT candidate Ciro Gomez’s economic program.