Interview by Bhaskar Sunkara Sabrina Fernandes

Lula da Silva, dubbed by Perry Anderson as the most successful politician of the modern era, would have almost certainly won Brazil’s October election if he were allowed to contest.

But with Lula still in prison on trumped up corruption charges, the neo-fascist Jair Bolsonaro, who is currently recovering in hospital after a near fatal stabbing, is leading in the polls. Lula’s Workers Party (PT) was in dire need of an alternative to contest him in the upcoming election. They have one now in the form of Fernando Haddad, a former Lula administration education minister and São Paulo mayor.

Haddad faces the immense challenge of filling Lula’s shoes, while Lula’s endorsement proved enough to elevate Dilma Rousseff — a little known figure before the 2010 election — into the presidency, after the soft coup that removed Dilma from power, his endorsement perhaps won’t be enough to propel Haddad into the presidency.

After fourteen years of uninterrupted governance, following economic crisis and corruption scandals Dilma was toppled through as soft “constitutional coup” led by her former allies in the Movement for Brazilian Democracy Party (PMDB). Dilma was meant to be the sacrifice that would save Brazil’s establishment policies from the storms created by corruption and recession, her vice-president Michel Temer was elevated to office with the mission of introducing austerity that nobody voted for and undoing the successes of the PT in government.

The same coup that was meant to destroy the PT once and for all, ended up having the significant unintentional effect of discrediting Brazil’s political center-right political establishment. That’s opened the door to furies that have propelled Bolsonaro as the leading right-wing candidate.

The PT by any standard can boast of its historic achievements in office, uplifting millions of Brazilians out poverty, seriously expanding social citizenship, and making Brazil a significant international actor. However, the party did not do enough to challenge the structures of Brazilian inequality and the type of social apartheid it has birthed. It did not break with neoliberalism, it did not break the power of Brazil’s murderous police, it did not challenge Brazil’s reactionary oligarchical media, and it failed to reform Brazil’s broken political system.

Amid political violence, a continued economic crisis, and talk of a military coup, Haddad — now second in the polls — is the center-left candidate who will likely face the forces of a right that place little value on democracy. Haddad, a former professor at the University of São Paulo and scholar of Marxist theory, has been often criticized for being aloof and lacking the popular touch. For instance, he lost to Brazil’s Trump wannabee playboy João Doria in the first round of the 2016 municipal elections.

Many on the Left, too, hold a grudge against him for his handling of June 2013 anticorruption protests. Notably, unlike Lula and the PT’s other historic leaders, Haddad does not come out of a mass movement of the working class. Haddad is a product of the PT that governed Brazil, not the party that once was the inspiration for the radical left across the world. Yet it might be up to him to preserve Brazilian democracy.

Earlier this year, Jacobin founding editor Bhaskar Sunkara traveled to São Paolo to have a wide-ranging conversation with Haddad, with contributing editor Sabrina Fernandes translating and contributing to the discussion. Haddad’s account of the PT’s time in power, the tasks of the Brazilian left today, and the threat from the Right is one that leftists across the Americas should understand and reckon with.

Introduction by Benjamin Fogel.