Changing Repertoires of State-Society Interaction under Lula

Abstract

During Luis Inácio Lula da Silva’s two administrations as president of Brazil (2003–10), an entirely different kind of actor took over government decision- making. These are the conclusions of an innovative study by Maria Celina D’Araújo, who examined the social and political profile of upper- echelon federal government personnel during that period. She found that for the first time in Brazilian history, former union activists participated substantially in high levels of government, a fact that may not be that surprising considering that the Workers’ Party, and especially the President, had strong links to that sector. Under Lula, D’Araújo found that ‘about 26 percent of Ministers in the first term and 16 percent in the second came from labor unions’ (2009, p. 117). The ministers were also closely connected to more broadly defined social movements: 43 percent in the first administration and 45 percent of those in the second participated in some way in movements, compared to around a quarter of ministers under the previous two presidencies (Ibid., p. 120). For D’Araújo, these numbers suggest that the Lula government represented a more diverse array of interests than seen in the past. Our argument in this chapter is that, in that context, social movements and state actors creatively experimented with historical patterns of state- society interaction and reinterpreted routines of communication and negotiation.