that democracy would be created in Brazil by the many
social groups that opposed the military coming together.
He said that what was needed was a “reactivation of civil
society … the professional associations, the trade unions,
the churches, the student organizations, the study groups
and the debating circles, the social movements”—in other
words, a broad coalition with the aim of re-creating
democracy and changing Brazilian society.
The Scânia factory heralded the formation of this
coalition. By late 1978, Lula was floating the idea of
creating a new political party, the Workers’ Party. This was
to be the party not just of trade unionists, however. Lula
insisted that it should be a party for all wage earners and
the poor in general. Here the attempts of union leaders to
organize a political platform began to coalesce with the
many social movements that were springing up. On August
18, 1979, a meeting was held in São Paulo to discuss the
formation of the Workers’ Party, which brought together
former opposition politicians, union leaders, students,
intellectuals, and people representing one hundred diverse
social movements that had begun to organize in the 1970s
across Brazil. The Workers’ Party, launched at the São
Judas Tadeo restaurant in São Bernardo in October 1979,
would come to represent all these diverse groups.
The party quickly began to benefit from the political
opening that the military was reluctantly organizing. In the
local elections of 1982, it ran candidates for the first time,
and won two races for mayor. Throughout the 1980s, as
democracy was gradually re-created in Brazil, the Workers’
Party began to take over more and more local
governments. By 1988 it controlled the governments in
thirty-six municipalities, including large cities such as São
Paulo and Porto Alegre. In 1989, in the first free
presidential elections since the military coup, Lula won 16
percent of the vote in the first round as the party’s
candidate. In the runoff race with Fernando Collor, he won
44 percent.
In taking over many local governments, something that
accelerated in the 1990s, the Workers’ Party began to
enter into a symbiotic relationship with many local social
movements. In Porto Alegre the first Workers’ Party
administration after 1988 introduced “participatory