Interview by Cauê Seignemartin Ameni Hugo Albuquerque Benjamin Fogel

Thirty-seven-year-old former journalist and communist militant Manuela D’Ávila might just be the next vice president of Brazil. The ex-journalist and student leader forms a vital part of the Workers Party (PT) slate along with their presidential candidate Fernando Haddad, the political successor to former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, currently in prison.

Despite D’Ávila’s relative youth, she already boasts an impressive political career as a former city councilor in Porto Alegre, state deputy, and federal deputy for Rio Grande do Sul, the southernmost state in Brazil. She has won every election she’s taken part in for her party, The Communist Party of Brazil (PCdoB), since 2005. Her rise to the leadership of the PCdoB could represent something of a left turn for the party, as it seeks to channel the energies of a new political generation.

In November 2017, the PCdoB nominated D’Ávila as their presidential candidate, but in August 2018 she dropped her candidacy after formalizing an alliance with the PT.

Manuela was originally meant to be the vice-presidential candidate for former president Lula’s slate. However, despite leading all the polls, Lula was blocked by an electoral court from running in August and replaced by Fernando Haddad, former mayor of São Paulo.

Despite having backed PT in every election since 1989, the PCdoB’s alliance with the PT was not guaranteed this time around. In the months leading up to the campaign, the PCdoB had been flirting with the other major center-left candidate, the Democratic Labor Party’s (PDT) Ciro Gomes. Gomes’s national developmentalist vision in many respects is closer to the PCdoB’s politics than the PT’s particular form of social democracy.

However, Lula — even behind bars — remains the one true political maestro in Brazil and was able to coordinate a series of political maneuvers that undermined Gomes’s candidacy. One of these was to secure an alliance with the PCdoB.

D’Ávila is one of the youngest leaders of the PCdoB, whose origins can be traced back to 1922. The PCdoB is one of Brazil’s two Communist parties — the other being the Brazilian Communist Party (PCB) which is backing PSOL’s presidential candidate Guilherme Boulos. The PCdoB and the PCB split in 1962 after the Sino-Soviet Split, with the PCB representing the pro-Moscow faction and the PCdoB being closer to Beijing (the adoption of Maoism by the party was formalized in 1966).

After the 1964 military coup, divisions within Brazil’s communist movement were further accentuated by the debate about armed struggle. After the dictatorship entered a newly repressive phase in 1968, the PCdoB attempted to launch armed insurgency in the Amazon in 1969. The insurgency was ill-fated and brutally crushed by the military with ample usage of torture, mass killing, napalm, and numerous other human rights abuses. The defeat and the loss of almost a whole generation of key leaders forced the party to reorient their strategy.

Due to this experience, and the rapprochement between China and the United States, the PCdoB broke with China in 1978. It adopted instead the line of Albanian leader Enver Hoxha (until 1992) and began to organize within the trade union and student movements following the onset of the democratization process in the 1980s.

Initially, the PCdoB along with the PCB were hostile to the new trade union leadership and supported the official opposition party, the Movement for Brazilian Democracy (MDB). But this changed by the 1989 elections after the PCdoB aligned itself with the PT and its trade union allies. With the fall of the Soviet bloc, the PCdoB moved towards an internally oriented strategy and by 1992 had aligned itself internationally once again to China.

The party has come to dominate the National Student Union (UNE) through its youth wing Socialist Youth Union (UJS), where Manuela got her political start. Critics of the PCdoB accuse UJS of using authoritarian and opportunistic methods to maintain a stranglehold on UNE.

The party and its youth played a key role in the Fora Collor (“Collor out”) movement that saw former president Fernando Collor de Mello impeached in 1992 following economic crisis and a major corruption scandal. It’s the largest of the two Communist parties and is the most influential heir to Brazil’s communist tradition. It’s also the only one with governance experience, following its historic victory in the 2014 gubernatorial elections in Brazil’s poorest state, Maranhão. In the process, they broke the hold of the Sarneys –– one of Brazil’s most backwards, depraved, and powerful oligarchical clans–– over the state’s politics.

The PCdoB forms part of the so-called governista bloc: the coalition of parties and movements that has strongly backed the PT governments since 2002. However, it differs from the PT and other forces on the radical left in several respects; in particular through its embrace of nationalism and developmentalism. Its version of communism sees the national development of Brazil as the primary struggle for the Left.

However, the party has many critics on the left who accuse the party of supporting the more right-wing elements of the PT’s governance, especially its use of “anti-imperialist” rhetoric to justify — in the name of national development — the exploitation of the Amazon at the expense of local peasant and indigenous communities.

Furthermore, the party’s former leader Aldo Rebelo (who briefly acted as president in 2005), a former government minister and principal author of the changes to forest code which favored the interests of agribusiness, betrayed Dilma Rousseff in 2015 by aligning himself to Temer and the coup. Rebelo left the party in 2017, leaving behind a crisis that D’Ávila’s candidacy is a direct response to.

In the wake of this disaster, D’Ávila’s strong feminist rhetoric and embrace of elements of the Brazilian youth movement could mark a left turn from the party’s nationalist and conservative elements.

Her candidacy comes at a tense time in Brazilian history, with Lula’s exclusion from the presidential race and the far-right Jair Bolsonaro leading in the polls.

In this interview conducted shortly before giving up her presidential candidacy to run with Haddad, D’Ávila talks about the Brazilian crisis, misogyny and the issues facing women in politics, how she sees the reconstruction of the Left, and other issues.