Hope Came from the South: Lula's Victory, Brazil's Hundred Years, and the Road Before the Class

Hope Came from the South

Fascism Was Stopped at the Ballot, but Not Defeated

In Brief: What Happened, and What It Means

Dear Young Comrades,

On Sunday 25 October 2026, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was elected president of Brazil for the fourth time. With 98.3 per cent of ballot boxes counted, the Superior Electoral Court (TSE) gave Lula 51.75 per cent of the valid vote (about 63 million votes) and Senator Flávio Bolsonaro, son of Jair Bolsonaro, 48.25 per cent (about 58.8 million). Three weeks earlier, in the first round on 4 October, Flávio had come first with 47.03 per cent and Lula second with 45.16 per cent, and every poll had Flávio ahead in the runoff too. For the first time in Brazilian history, a candidate who finished the first round second won the second.

This result is a victory against the reactionary and fascist wave covering the world. In a period of Trump in Washington, Milei in Buenos Aires, Kast in Santiago, Meloni in Rome, Orbán in Budapest, a rising AfD in Germany, a genocide continuing in Gaza, and trustees and arrests in Turkey, the far-right candidate in Latin America's largest country was stopped in the runoff even though he had won the first round. The candidate the Trump administration openly backed with tariffs and sanctions was beaten. Those who say "fascism is inevitable" were answered: it is not inevitable; it can be stopped.

One man did not win this victory. The poor of the Northeast, the black youth of the favelas, women, landless peasants, homeless workers, the unions, the socialist parties, and the movement that began two years ago with a retail worker's video and struck the six-day week (6x1) from the constitution won it. The 40-hour working week, which came into force nine days before the election, was this election's most concrete gain.

But it is also our task to see the whole of the truth. In the same election Bolsonaro's party, the PL, became the largest party in the Chamber of Deputies and the strongest group in the Senate. The moment the result was settled, the dollar jumped 10 per cent. Lula held the palace. Land, banks, mines, the media, and Congress stayed in the right's hands. Fascism was stopped at the ballot, but it was not defeated.

In this piece we first tell that Sunday night and map the reactionary wave in the world. Then we take up Lula's life, with his past, his compromises, and his years in prison. Then we look at the history of Brazil from the last country to abolish slavery to the government of a workers' party, at the figures of today's Brazil, at who really made the victory, and at the Brazilian socialist movement, together with the CIPOML record. Then we open onto the world, from Nepal to Kenya, from Serbia to the United States, from Turkey to France, and show that the broad masses seeking their rights are still demanding, and are still looking for a road to transform the world. At the end we make a class assessment with our usual three questions and set out concrete tasks: In whose hands? Under whose control? For whose benefit?

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Part One: A Sunday Night

Two rounds, two pictures

	First round (4 October)	Runoff (25 October, 98.3% counted)
Lula (PT)	45.16% — 53.9 million	51.75% — 63.0 million
Flávio Bolsonaro (PL)	47.03% — 56.1 million	48.25% — 58.8 million
Augusto Cury (Avante)	2.89%	—
Renan Santos (Missão)	2.24%	—
Ronaldo Caiado (PSD)	2.18%	—
Romeu Zema (NOVO)	0.27%	—
Samara Martins (UP)	0.10% — 122,911 votes	—
Hertz Dias (PSTU)	0.04%	—
Edmilson Costa (PCB)	0.02%	—
Rui Costa Pimenta (PCO)	0.01%	—
Turnout	78.9% (158.7 million registered voters)	Higher than expected

In the first round Flávio won 14 states and the Federal District, and Lula won 12 states. Minas Gerais and Tocantins, which had voted for Lula in 2022, turned to Flávio this time. In Brazil voting is compulsory between the ages of 18 and 70, yet turnout stayed at 79 per cent, which shows that a fifth of the population was saying "none of them represents me." Part of that fifth returned to the ballot in the runoff and decided the result.

What changed in three weeks?

On the evening of 4 October Lula called the result "unexpected." Flávio said "the end of the PT era is coming." On 16 October the polls still had Flávio ahead, 52 to 48.

Two things that settled the result happened between the rounds. First, every component of the Brazilian left united on a single target without lowering its flags and without hiding its differences. The title of the PCB's call on 6 October was "Agora é Lula" (Now it is Lula), and it contained this sentence: "Without intense work in the streets it will not be possible to beat the far right at the ballot." The campaign went door to door, neighbourhood to neighbourhood. Second, on 16 October the constitutional amendment that abolished the 6x1 and cut the working week from 44 hours to 40 came into force. For millions of workers, one more day of rest a week: a gain you can hold in your hand.

High turnout on election day worked for Lula. In the first hours of the count Flávio appeared ahead (at 15 per cent counted, 50.1 to 49.9). At the halfway mark Lula went ahead and opened the gap. At 21:00 the result was mathematically settled.

The poor person's bus

A crisis on election day showed how material the struggle in Brazil is. From the morning, breakdowns in public transport were reported in many places, above all São Paulo and Bahia. The PT claimed that 31 per cent of the bus fleet in São Paulo had been cut. Who goes to the ballot by bus? The person without a car; that is, the poor; that is, for the most part, the Lula voter. In Salvador a transport official who had cut services was detained the same day.

The Lula campaign asked for an extension of voting hours. When the TSE dragged its feet, they went to the Supreme Federal Court (STF). Justice Cristiano Zanin, Lula's former lawyer, joined this request to the Bolsonaro campaign's request on grounds of rain and extended voting nationwide until 19:00. The count stopped for two hours. This decision became the right's main objection. Elected senator Marcel van Hattem said he would start an impeachment process against Zanin. Eduardo Bolsonaro said the decision "did not inspire confidence." Some Bolsonaro supporters announced they would not recognise the result. The Brazilian Bar Association (OAB) defended the elected president's taking office. When this piece was written there was no verified statement that Flávio Bolsonaro had conceded defeat.

The invisible ballot: the algorithm voted too

One front of the election was on the screen. Internal correspondence published by Folha de S.Paulo on 16 October showed that Meta had restricted the reach of Lula's Instagram account while pushing Flávio Bolsonaro forward in recommendation systems. The Lula campaign announced that in a single day it had failed to reach 1.3 million people. The TSE found no proof of intent, but it ordered Meta to treat the two candidates equally, on pain of a daily fine. We took this up in detail in Meta in Brazil, Access Bans in Turkey: whether or not there is intent, a platform's error, and the order in which it corrects that error, is a political decision; and a monopoly exempt from public control makes that decision.

Against the algorithm: the timed task

Meta's restriction of the official account did not mean the campaign had lost the screen. What was lost was the reach of a single account. What was built against that in the runoff was not a piece of software. It was a WhatsApp broadcast channel.

The channel's name is "Lula's Army" (Exército do Lula). André Janones, a federal deputy from Minas Gerais for the Rede party, opened it in April. According to what Janones told Folha, it had about 50,000 members up to the first round. According to Agência Brasil it had reached 3.7 million on 13 October. According to Folha and O Globo it had passed 10.8 million on the night of 24 October. This is not a group. Only the administrator writes. The rest share, or answer with an emoji. O Globo's report of 22 October says the campaigns saw the channel as a "cannon": in a few minutes it can change what is being talked about on X, and by mass repetition it can press a chosen message into Instagram's recommendation system. The right was already using this form. In October the Flávio side opened "Flávio's Troop" (Tropa do Flávio), run by the deputy Nikolas Ferreira. According to O Globo it too had 2.1 million members on the night of 24 October.

The model is the technique Janones himself described. On 13 October he told journalists this: the supporter should like, comment, and share before watching the video. Engagement that arrives at once tells Meta's algorithm "this is relevant," and organic distribution grows. The second part is timed. At a set hour everyone writes the same hashtag, the same prepared comment, or the same search term. Poder360 reported that on the afternoon of 17 October at least eight pro-Lula hashtags entered X's most-talked-about list at the same time. Folha also reported that Janones gave the digital troop the task of pushing searches against the opponent. On 22 October Lula posted 109 times, and 94 per cent of the comments the two candidates received gathered on him. Flávio posted 14 times the same day. His average of likes was higher: 175,000 to 125,000. The task enlarged comments and repetition. It did not, by itself, settle likes.

That this was not bots stands in the paper the platforms gave the TSE. On an application from the Flávio campaign, the court's president, Kassio Nunes Marques, gave Meta, Google, and X 24 hours to report. According to the X report, as relayed by CNN Brasil, the 58 hashtags examined amounted to about 8.2 million posts and about 476,000 accounts. The activity was concentrated at certain hours. About 97 per cent of the accounts showed no sign of automation, fake networks, or operation of multiple accounts. X suspended 12,454 accounts, sent 398 accounts back through phone verification, and wrote to the TSE that its own rule allows real users to coordinate. Google reported that it had found no automated traffic, scripted attacks, or botnets. On 23 October Meta said it saw no breach of its rules in the coordination on the channel or on Janones's Instagram posts. What it counts as unlawful is organising violence or crime. Lawful political mobilisation by real, identified people is something the TSE's own decision also treats as legitimate. In the same filing Meta added that part of the evidence was a pen drive that reached it only that Friday, and that it wanted five more days. The sentence "no breach" is a first answer, given before the examination was finished.

The court also tried to shut the same channel. According to Agência Brasil, on 11 October Nunes Marques stopped the channel entirely. Justice Ricardo Villas Bôas Cueva, the TSE's inspector general, lifted the decision within hours. On 13 October new messages and new members were stopped again. The ground was not that the content was false. It was that the channel's address had not been notified to the electoral court in advance. Return was tied to that notice and to 48 hours. Meta was ordered to watch this channel and the other wide-reaching channels the campaigns had pointed out. The channel was working again in the following days. The platform can cut distribution. The court can cut the microphone. The "army" stands under both.

Two conclusions follow. First, the algorithm is not an unbeatable black box. A recommendation system reads real accounts that do the same act at the same hour as interest. While the official account was restricted, this signal was produced from outside, by millions of people. Second, this is not a class organisation. One deputy gives the decision. The language is military: task, soldier, army. The order to "share before you watch" asks a person to multiply what they have not seen. Janones did not hide that he knew the mobilisation the opposition had built on WhatsApp and that he was doing the same work. On Quaest's digital attention index, Lula was more than 10 points behind on the eve of the first round, and between 8 and 11 October he reached 83.3 points. That is not the ballot. On 16 October the voting-intention polls still had Flávio ahead, 52 to 48. The turn on the screen did not take the place of the turn at the ballot. What turned the ballot was the door-to-door work, the Northeast, the 6x1, and the voter who came back for the runoff.

The market's reply

The moment the result was settled, the dollar futures contract jumped about 10 per cent. Bloomberg Economics had already calculated that a Lula victory would push the real down by more than 3.5 per cent. The people vote at the ballot. Capital votes in the exchange rate, the interest rate, and the bond. And capital's vote returns a result faster: the dollar jumps, imports and fuel go up, the Central Bank raises interest, debt service grows, social spending is cut. They call this "market discipline." Let us name it properly: capital's unelected veto. But let us also see this. This veto has worked at every Lula victory since 2003. Lula's governments still reduced poverty, wiped hunger off the map, and shortened the working week. The veto is strong. It can be overcome when the pressure of the masses is stronger.

Outside intervention

This election was not lived as an internal matter. Reuters reported that a campaign was being run inside the Trump administration's State Department to return the Bolsonaro family to power. In the summer of 2025 Trump, citing the prosecution of Jair Bolsonaro, put a 50 per cent tariff on Brazilian goods and sanctioned Justice Alexandre de Moraes, who was conducting the coup case. Lula's Minister of Justice, Jorge Messias, openly accused the United States of intervention during the campaign. Before the election Trump contented himself with saying "we are watching."

From the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 to the Brazilian coup of 1964, from Chile in 1973 and Víctor Jara's broken hands to today, the United States has seen the continent as its "backyard." What is new is that this intervention is now done openly, with tariffs and sanctions, and no longer by covert operation. The panic we saw in the piece on the real state of the American left speaks the same language in the south of the continent.

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Part Two: The Wave Covering the World

To understand the value of the result in Brazil, the size of the wave has to be seen.

Country	Development	Class content
United States	Trump's second term: the hunt for migrants, pressure on universities and the press, tariff wars, open intervention in Latin America	The direct fusion of finance and technology capital with the state; the programme we described in From Futurism to Techno-Fascism
Argentina	Milei's "chainsaw" programme, the melting of pensions, pressure on strikes	The IMF prescription applied in the language of the street
Chile	The coming to power of Kast, a defender of Pinochet	The liquidation of the 2019 revolt and of the constitutional process
Ecuador, Peru, El Salvador	States of emergency and mass imprisonment in the name of "security"	The militarisation of poor neighbourhoods
Italy, Hungary, the Netherlands	Meloni, Orbán, Wilders: hostility to migrants, control of the press, intervention in the judiciary	European capital's "orderly" fascism
Germany	The AfD reaching 43.8 per cent in Saxony-Anhalt	We took this up in our AfD piece: the anger of the dispossessed East drained to the right
Israel/Palestine	A genocide in Gaza lasting more than two years	The barest face of the imperialist order
India	Modi's Hindu nationalism	The alliance of big capital and religious nationalism
Turkey	Trustees over municipalities, the arrest of opposition politicians and journalists, a TMSF trustee over channels, digital censorship	We told this in Whose Case Is Being Heard in Silivri?, Who Blacked Out the Screen?, and We Stand with Journalists on 24 October

The common denominator of this wave is this. After the crisis of 2008, capital accumulation slowed, the middle classes were proletarianised, and the remains of the social state were liquidated. Social democracy and "the centre" managed this process and made the working class pay the bill. The masses seeking their rights stopped voting for the centre that was selling them. Where the left was not strong enough to organise these masses, the far right filled the gap: turning the anger onto the migrant, the woman, and "the elites," and letting capital slip out of sight.

What made Brazil different was that the gap had not been left entirely to the right. There was a forty-year workers' party, a forty-year landless movement, urban occupations, socialist parties, and the new generation's 6x1 movement. In front of the masses seeking their rights, a door other than the right was open. The masses went through that door.

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Part Three: Who Is Lula?

To tell Lula is to tell the twentieth century of the Brazilian working class. We tell him as a whole, with his errors and his contributions, counting him neither a saint nor a villain.

Thirteen days in the back of a truck

Luiz Inácio da Silva was born on 27 October 1945 in Caetés, in Pernambuco, in Brazil's dry and poor Northeast. He was the seventh of eight children of a landless peasant family. His father went south to work in the port of Santos when Lula was two weeks old, and founded a second family there. In 1952 his mother, Dona Lindu, put the children in the open back of a truck and migrated to São Paulo on a journey that lasted 13 days. This was the journey of hundreds of thousands of nordestinos: from the Northeast of the latifundia and the drought to the outskirts of the industrialising Southeast. Lula's story is the story of the formation of the Brazilian proletariat.

Lula learned to read at ten and left school in the second grade. At eight he sold goods in the street, at twelve he shone shoes, at fourteen he worked in a warehouse. In 1961 he became a press apprentice in a screw factory. In 1964, the year of the military coup, at nineteen, on the night shift, he lost the little finger of his left hand under the press. That finger later became a symbol: the man who became president carried the factory's mark on his hand.

A reluctant entry into the union, an exit through the strike

Lula's brother Frei Chico took him to the union. Frei Chico was a member of the then-illegal Brazilian Communist Party and was tortured under the dictatorship. Lula was at first distant from politics. In 1969 he became an alternate officer of the union. In 1971 his first wife, Lourdes, died of hepatitis while pregnant. Lula later told this loss as the moment he learned what a poor person's right to health means.

In 1975 he was elected president of the São Bernardo Metalworkers' Union. In May 1978, when workers at the Scania factory sat down at their machines and stopped work, a new period began in a Brazil where the strike had been banned since 1964. In the ABC industrial belt, where the Volkswagen, Ford, and Mercedes factories stand, the strikes were repeated in 1979 and 1980 and spread to half a million workers. At the Vila Euclides stadium, in front of tens of thousands of workers, without a sound system, Lula spoke by having his sentences passed back through the crowd. In 1980 he spent a month in prison and the union leadership was removed. But the dictatorship could no longer shut the working class inside the factory.

These strikes created a movement based on the factory floor, outside the state-directed unionism left from the Vargas period: the "new unionism." From this movement the Workers' Party (PT) was born in 1980 and the Unified Workers' Central (CUT) in 1983. The PT was the first mass party in Latin America born from the working class's own organisations, uniting trade unionists, base churches tied to Liberation Theology, landless peasants, communist and Trotskyist groups, and intellectuals. Lula was its first president.

Three defeats and a letter

In 1989, in the first direct election after the dictatorship, Lula lost to Collor in the runoff with 47 per cent. Two days before the election, Globo television broadcast an edited summary of the final debate in Collor's favour: a textbook case of the media's class partiality. In 1994 and 1998 he lost to Cardoso. After every defeat the PT moved a little further to the centre. In 2002, with the "Letter to the Brazilian People," Lula guaranteed the markets that debts would be paid and the inflation target kept, and made the textile industrialist José Alencar his running mate. This was an open compromise with capital, and it drew heavy criticism inside the left. Lula was elected with 61 per cent.

The cost and the return of this compromise have to be seen together. The cost: the banks announced the highest profits in their history, land reform stopped, the unions were tied to the government, and in 2005 the Mensalão corruption scandal shook the party's claim to moral superiority. The return: with Bolsa Família, 12 million families received cash support, the minimum wage rose by more than 50 per cent in real terms, poverty fell by nearly half, child malnutrition fell 46 per cent in the first period, poor and black youth entered university through quotas, the IMF debt was paid off early in 2005, Brazil became a net creditor in 2008, and BRICS was founded. Lula left office in 2010 with 80 per cent approval. The UN World Food Programme declared him "world champion in the fight against hunger." In his own words: "The poor have never gained so much, and neither have the rich."

580 days

The Lava Jato operation, which began in 2014, uncovered the bribery network around Petrobras and at the same time became the legal instrument for removing the PT from power. In 2016 Dilma Rousseff was removed by Congress on a disputed financial pretext. This was a parliamentary coup. In 2017 Justice Sergio Moro sentenced Lula to prison over the claim of a holiday apartment. On appeal the sentence rose to 12 years. He was banned from entering the 2018 election, in which the polls had him far ahead.

On 7 April 2018 Lula walked out through the crowd waiting for him, from the building of the São Bernardo Metalworkers' Union where he had led the strikes forty years before, and surrendered to the police. He spent 580 days in Curitiba. Militants who camped in front of the prison called "Good morning, Lula!" to him for 580 mornings, in the rain and the cold.

After convicting Lula, Moro became Bolsonaro's minister of justice. Correspondence leaked in 2019 showed that the judge had coordinated in secret with the prosecutors. In 2021 the Supreme Court annulled all the convictions. In 2022 Lula beat Bolsonaro with 50.9 per cent. On 8 January 2023 Bolsonaro supporters stormed Congress, the Supreme Court, and the presidential palace. The coup attempt failed. In 2025 Jair Bolsonaro was sentenced to 27 years and 3 months in prison for planning a coup.

The third term: gains and limits

Between 2023 and 2026 unemployment fell to the lowest level in history, 5.4 per cent. Poverty fell from 31.6 per cent to 23.1 per cent, and extreme poverty from 5.9 per cent to 3.5 per cent. In one year 8.6 million people left poverty. In 2025 Brazil left the UN Hunger Map for the second time. Income up to 5,000 reais a month was exempted from tax. Deforestation in the Amazon fell to its lowest in ten years. And the 6x1 was abolished.

In the same period public debt and household debt broke records. The policy interest rate stayed in the 13–15 per cent band for most of the period, and interest payments became the largest item in the budget. The "new fiscal framework" put a ceiling on social spending. Agribusiness-export capital made the highest exports in its history. The Banco Master and INSS corruption investigations wore the government down. At the end of 2024 Lula underwent brain surgery.

And at 81 he was elected for the fourth time, in his own words for the last time. Is there another factory worker in the world elected to govern their country four times? Even this question tells Lula's historical place.

The Lula phenomenon: product and limit of the class movement

How should Lula be assessed? The Marxist method teaches us to read the individual inside the class relations that produced them. Lula is a leader produced by the Brazilian working class's rising of 1978–1985, who carried that rising to the top of the state and there, by compromising with capital, provided his class with concrete improvements. Lula is not a revolutionary. He does not claim to be one. Nor is he a "traitor to the class." He is the most able representative of the class compromise.

What this compromise brought is real: fuller plates, a higher minimum wage, a first generation entering university. A left that belittles these gains cannot speak with the poor. But none of these gains touched property relations. Land, banks, mines, and the media stayed in the same hands. That is why every gain remained open to being taken back in the next crisis. 2016–2022 is precisely the history of that taking back. In the PT's first period the CUT was largely turned into an extension of the government, the MST had to content itself with credit and programmes instead of land reform, and the class's independent organisation retreated. When the streets filled against the PT in 2013, there was no independent class force to fill the gap. The right filled it.

But this also has to be said plainly. In a world where fascism is rising, the existence of a former metalworker who spent 580 days in prison, whose conviction was annulled, and who at 81 beat the far right's candidate, is a proof for every person seeking their rights anywhere in the world. A poor peasant's child, a worker who left a finger in the factory, can govern a country; and when they are thrown in prison, their class may not forget them.

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Part Four: Brazil's Hundred Years

Three structural facts

To understand Brazil, three facts have to be written first. First, Brazil is the last country on the American continent to abolish slavery (1888). About five million people brought in chains from Africa are the ancestors of the black and mixed-race Brazilians who today make up 57 per cent of the population. This population makes up 71 per cent of the poor. Second, land ownership is one of the most concentrated structures in the world: 1 per cent of farms holds close to half the agricultural land. Third, Brazilian capitalism is a dependent capitalism: sugar, gold, coffee, rubber, soya, iron ore, oil; in every period a structure that sells raw materials to the world market and depends on the outside for industry and finance. A hundred years of class struggle flows over these three facts.

A table of periods

Period	Ruling bloc	Class movement	Break
1889–1930 Old Republic	Coffee oligarchy and the dairy states: "café com leite"	The 1917 São Paulo general strike; the Communist Party (PCB) was founded in 1922	The 1929 crisis collapsed coffee
1930–1945 Vargas and the Estado Novo	Industrialising state, urban bourgeoisie, the army	The 1935 communist uprising was crushed; Prestes spent 9 years in prison; his wife Olga Benário was handed to the Nazis and died in a camp; the 1943 Labour Law: rights were given, unions were tied to the state	The state tied the worker to the union and the union to the state
1945–1964 Populist Republic	Tension between the national bourgeoisie and US capital	The PCB's mass influence, the Peasant Leagues, Paulo Freire's literacy campaign, Goulart's land and education reforms	The US-backed coup of 1 April 1964
1964–1985 Dictatorship	Army, international capital, the land oligarchy	Armed resistance (ALN, MR-8, the PCdoB's Araguaia guerrilla, the PCR) was crushed; the ABC strikes of 1978–80; the PT in 1980, the CUT in 1983, the MST in 1984	The "economic miracle" and the debt crisis; a controlled transition
1985–2002 New Republic	Finance capital, the privatising bourgeoisie	The 1988 Constitution: social rights and the SUS public health system; the 1996 Eldorado dos Carajás massacre (19 landless people killed); the privatisation of Vale and Telebrás	The PT moved to the centre
2003–2016 The PT period	Class compromise: finance, agribusiness-export, the state, and workers' organisations	Bolsa Família, the minimum wage, quotas; the tying of the CUT and the MST to the government; the June 2013 protests	The end of the commodity cycle, Lava Jato, the parliamentary coup of 2016
2016–2022 Restoration	Finance, agribusiness-export, the evangelical right, and the army returned	The 2017 labour reform (subcontracting, a financial blow to the CUT); the spending ceiling; Lula in prison; the killing of Marielle Franco; more than 700,000 deaths in the pandemic	The storming of 8 January 2023
2023–2026 Lula III	A fragile compromise; Congress on the right	Poverty and unemployment fell, an exit from the hunger map; the 6x1 movement and 40 hours; Bolsonaro's conviction	2026: Lula won, Congress shifted right

Two things history teaches

First: at every rising (1917, 1935, 1960–64, 1978–85, 2003–13) the Brazilian working class tore concessions from the bourgeoisie. Each time those concessions were tried to be taken back, either by coup (1937, 1964, 2016) or by "market discipline" (the 1990s, 2017). In the ruling bloc there is a continuity. From the coffee oligarchy to the soya barons, the landowners never fell from power. Today the agricultural lobby in Congress is the strongest bloc above the parties. Since the 1990s finance capital has taken the largest share of the budget through interest. The army returned to barracks in 1985 but did not account for itself. The evangelical churches organised in the poor neighbourhoods the left had emptied. Today a third of the population is evangelical, and it is Flávio's firmest base.

Second: no taking-back was complete. The labour law of 1943 is still in force today. The public health system of 1988, the SUS, kept millions alive in the pandemic. Even Bolsonaro could not abolish Bolsa Família; he only changed its name. The university quotas remained. And in 2026 the 40 hours arrived. The history of Brazil is the history of masses seeking their rights standing up again after every coup: the ABC strikes fourteen years after 1964; Lula's return six years after 2016; fascism stopped at the ballot three years after 8 January. The ground of hope is not an abstract optimism. It is this hundred-year experience.

For those looking from Turkey the lesson is familiar. What protects the gains of the class movement is not the article of the constitution. It is the organised force behind that article. As we told in our 12 September dossier, when the force scatters, the article stays on paper.

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Part Five: Today's Brazil in Figures

Indicator	Figure	What it means
Population	~213 million	Close to half of Latin America
Unemployment (January 2026)	5.4%, the lowest in history	5.9 million unemployed; 2.7 million people have given up looking for work
Informality	37.5% — 38.5 million people	One in three workers is without security; 26 million "own-account" workers
Average real income	3,652 reais a month	A record; but about 70% of the population is below two minimum wages
Poverty (2024)	23.1% — 49 million people	It was 31.6% in 2022; a large fall, and still one person in four
Extreme poverty (2024)	3.5% — 7.35 million	It is calculated that without social programmes it would be 10%
Gini (2024)	0.506	The most unequal country in Latin America after Colombia
Race and poverty	Black and mixed-race people are 56.8% of the population and 71.3% of the poor	The poverty rate is 15.1% among whites, 25.8% among black people, 29.8% among mixed-race people
Number of billionaires (2025)	56	Their wealth grew in the PT period too
Land	About 1% of farms holds close to half the land	According to the MST, the real source of hunger
Public budget	The largest item is interest payments	A rentier economy: the budget goes to the bank first
Weekly work	44 → 40 hours (Constitutional Amendment 141/2026)	In December 2026, 5x2 and 42 hours; in December 2027, 40 hours; no cut in pay
Hunger Map	Left it in 2014, then returned, left it again in 2025	In 2022, 33 million people faced hunger
Congress (2026)	The PL is the largest party with 121 of 513 seats; the strongest group in the Senate	The legislature is on the right

The table says two things at once. First, the Lula government's social policy measurably reduced poverty. A left that ignores this cannot tell 49 million poor people that "nothing changed." Second, this reduction happened in distribution, not in property. The billionaires multiplied. Land, banks, and mines stayed in the same hands. The sentence of the social scientist Alan Carvalho, speaking to Brasil de Fato, sums up the table: "Reducing poverty does not mean reducing inequality."

Looked at from a wider frame, Brazil is one of the world's ten largest economies. But the great part of its exports is soya, iron ore, crude oil, meat, and sugar. Industry's share of the economy has fallen by more than half since the 1980s. Raw materials are sold to China, the largest trading partner, and industrial goods are bought from China. Agribusiness-export capital, as the sector that brings in foreign currency, is a power no government has been able to touch. Finance capital collects rent from the budget at one of the highest real interest rates in the world. The working class lives on the share left between these two blocs.

The 37.5 per cent informality and the 26 million "own-account workers" need a separate look. This is the Brazilian form of the platform capitalism we told, through Turkey's courier-shopkeepers, in our Gig Economy Dossier: iFood couriers, app drivers, street vendors. This is the section that neither the traditional unions nor the left can easily reach, and that the Bolsonaro "entrepreneurship" discourse reaches most easily. Abolishing the 6x1 does not touch them directly, because their boss is an algorithm and the algorithm's week is seven days.

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Part Six: Who Made the Victory?

On election night Lula's face was on the screens. Those who made the victory were the ones who did not appear on the screen.

The Northeast. The region where Lula was born, Brazil's poorest and blackest region, the PT's firmest stronghold for twenty years. The region that knows in its body what Bolsa Família, the SUS, the rise in the minimum wage, and the university quotas mean. The Northeast's vote is not a vote of gratitude. It is a class vote.

Women. Bolsonarism was a period in which femicides increased and the discourse of the "traditional family" became the state. Since 2018, women voters in Brazil have stood markedly further from the right than men in every election. It is no accident that Popular Unity put femicides at the centre of its campaign and that its candidate was a black woman worker.

Black people and the favelas. In a country where police violence kills thousands of black youth every year, the discourse of "let the police kill" was not forgotten in the favelas. The militia networks behind the murder of Marielle Franco, the Rio city councillor killed in 2018, were on this election's agenda too.

The young, and the 6x1. At the end of 2023 a video a retail worker, Rick Azevedo, shared on social media gave birth to the "Life Beyond Work" movement (Vida Além do Trabalho, VAT). In 2024 the movement moved from a signature campaign to street demonstrations and from there to Congress. The unions and the left parties came after it. The government dragged its feet at first. As the movement grew, the question settled at the centre of the election agenda, and in October 2026 it became a constitutional amendment that even the right could not oppose: 75 to 1 in the Senate. The continuation, a hundred years on, of the eight-hour struggle we told in What Did the October Revolution Give the World? began on a phone screen. This is the most hopeful development in Brazil. A new generation of workers, from outside the unions and the parties, produced a class demand in its own language, and won.

The socialists. Popular Unity's candidate Samara Martins took 0.10 per cent in the first round. The candidates of the PCB and the PSTU took less. But in the runoff the militants of these parties went door to door. What has to be written in the victory's account is the socialists' maturity: both to unite against fascism and to defend their own programme.

The MST and the MTST. The Landless Rural Workers' Movement has settled hundreds of thousands of families on the land in forty years. The Homeless Workers' Movement has organised hundreds of thousands in the cities. The camps, occupations, schools, and kitchens of these movements are a network of solidarity that Bolsonarism could not reach.

The timed screen. While the official account's reach was cut, millions of people did the same act at the same hour. We wrote in Part One how that was built. Let us set the limit here. That channel is not the subject of the victory. The subject is the person who knocked on the door, who boarded the bus, who held the 6x1 in the street. The channel is a tool. Its command sits with one deputy, and the Flávio side built the same tool.

Lula did not win the victory. Those who voted for Lula won it. This distinction is not a play on words. The same people are the ones who, over the next four years, will pull the government to the left and the ones who will stop it sliding to the right.

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Part Seven: The Brazilian Socialist Movement

The Brazilian left is one of the most crowded and the most fragmented lefts in Latin America.

Currents

PCB — the Brazilian Communist Party (1922). One of the oldest parties on the continent. The 1935 uprising, short periods of legality, a long ban, the leadership of Luís Carlos Prestes. In 1962 the Maoist wing split and founded the PCdoB. In 1992 the party majority turned into the social-democratic PPS, and the remaining core kept the name PCB. Today it is small, to the left of the PSOL. In 2026 its candidate Edmilson Costa took 0.02 per cent, and in the runoff it made the "Agora é Lula" call.

PCdoB — the Communist Party of Brazil (1962). A Maoist break from the PCB. It lost dozens of militants in the Araguaia guerrilla of 1972–74. In the 1980s it drew close to Albania, then to China. Today it is the PT's most loyal coalition partner, the "communist" wing of the class compromise, with ministries and influence in the student union UNE.

PT — the Workers' Party (1980). We told it above: a party born from the working class's own organisations, which then moved to the centre, and for which the majority of the working class still votes.

PSTU (1994) and PCO (1995). Trotskyist groups that left the PT. The PSTU's candidate Hertz Dias took 0.04 per cent and supported Lula in the runoff. The PCO described the runoff as an election between "two candidates of capital."

PSOL — the Socialism and Freedom Party (2004). Founded by deputies expelled from the PT for voting against Lula's pension reform, and Marielle Franco's party. In 2026 it did not stand a candidate and supported Lula.

PCBR — the Revolutionary Communist Party of Brazil. In an election note dated December 2025 it wrote that the "bourgeois and social-liberal character" of the Lula–Alckmin government was "undeniable," rejected the "broad front" as a "lesser-evil" administration, and called for an independent revolutionary electoral option. For parliament it put Jones Manoel forward on the PSOL list. The title of its note of 6 October in the runoff sums up its position: "Vote for Lula to defeat Bolsonarism, organise the workers for the class struggle."

Mass organisations

CUT (1983): with millions of members, Latin America's largest union confederation. When the 2017 labour reform abolished the compulsory union due, it was shaken financially. MST (1984): one of the world's largest peasant movements; land occupations, agroecology, schools, cooperatives. MTST (1997): housing occupations in the cities. VAT (2023): the new kind of movement that put the 6x1 on the agenda.

The left's positions in 2026

Organisation	First round	Runoff	Reason
PT, PCdoB, PSB, PDT, PV, REDE	Lula	Lula	The government coalition
PSOL	Lula (did not stand a candidate)	Lula	To stop fascism
PCB	Edmilson Costa (0.02%)	Lula	To stop the far right "without lowering our flags, without hiding our differences"
PSTU	Hertz Dias (0.04%)	Lula	A vote against fascism
UP (PCR)	Samara Martins (0.10%)	Lula	"Defeat fascism; Bolsonaro never again"; the demands stay on the table
PCBR	No list of its own; a criticism of the broad front	Lula	"Vote for Lula, organise the workers for the class struggle"
PCO	Rui Costa Pimenta (0.01%)	Counted both candidates as "capital's candidate"	Rejection of the broad front

The table shows one fact. In the first round the total of every candidate to the left of the PT was 0.17 per cent. The Brazilian working class does not yet have an independent electoral force to the left of the PT. But in the runoff, apart from the PCO, almost the whole of the Brazilian left united on the same target. These two have to be seen together.

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Part Eight: Brazil According to the CIPOML Record

The International Conference of Marxist-Leninist Parties and Organisations (CIPOML) is an international unity founded in Quito in 1994, which assesses the post-1956 Soviet and Chinese lines as revisionism and rests on the accumulation of Lenin, Stalin, and Enver Hoxha. Its publication is Unity and Struggle. Its member in Brazil, since 2004, is the Revolutionary Communist Party (Partido Comunista Revolucionário, PCR).

The history of the PCR

The PCR was founded in Recife in May 1966 by militants who found the Maoist leadership of the PCdoB "rigid and revisionist." In the founding core were Amaro Luiz de Carvalho, Manoel Lisboa de Moura, Selma Bandeira, Valmir Costa, and Ricardo Zarattini. The founding document is the "12-Point Letter for Revolutionary Communists," written by Manoel Lisboa. For about seven years the party carried on armed resistance and mass work against the dictatorship in the Northeast (Alagoas, Pernambuco, Paraíba, Rio Grande do Norte). After 1968 the repression intensified. Amaro Luiz de Carvalho was killed in 1971, Manoel Lisboa de Moura in 1973. The party was largely scattered.

Those who survived worked in the student movement in the 1970s and took part in the refounding of the UNE. In 1981 Luiz Falcão of the PCR was elected vice-president of the UNE. The same year the party merged with MR-8. The merger failed, and in February 1995 the original core split away and refounded the PCR. In 1998 the 2nd Congress met and the first issue of the paper A Verdade (Truth) came out. Then the youth organisation UJR (Rebel Youth Union) was founded.

Line and fields of work

According to the CIPOML record, the PCR defines the working class as the leading force of the Brazilian socialist revolution, defends the dictatorship of the proletariat, rejects both Soviet revisionism and the Chinese Communist Party's "mixture of leftism and compromise," and takes the Leninist party form as its basis. Its fields of work: the Class Struggle Movement (MLC) inside the CUT; housing occupations in the cities with the Movement of Struggle in Neighbourhoods, Villages and Favelas (MLB); the currents the UJR leads in the student movement.

The party historically opposed the Lula and Dilma governments from the left and counted the Temer government illegitimate. It showed tactical flexibility in elections. In 2010 it called for a vote for Dilma, counting Serra as far right. In 2014 it supported the PSOL's candidate in the first round and Dilma in the runoff. Its line can be summed up as "at the ballot against fascism, in the street against the government."

The UP: an electoral front, and Samara Martins

Together with the MLB and other base movements, the PCR founded Popular Unity (Unidade Popular pelo Socialismo, UP). The UP received its electoral registration in 2019. The PCR defines its relation with the UP as "fraternal." The party's president is Leonardo Péricles, from the MLB.

In 2026 the UP stood a presidential candidate for the first time: Samara Martins, a black woman worker and trade unionist, with Raquel Bricio as her running mate. The axis of the campaign was Martins's sentence: "The rich need to stop running this country." The programme: the end of the 6x1, a 100 per cent rise in the minimum wage, the nationalisation of the banks and of natural wealth, a mobilisation against femicides, and an obligation for politicians to use the public health system. The result: 122,911 votes, 0.10 per cent, the highest vote among the candidates to the left of the PT.

On 8 October the UP announced second-round support for Lula. Péricles's call: "Into the streets to defeat fascism; Bolsonaro never again." Vivian Mendes, the UP's candidate for governor of São Paulo, stressed that the demands stayed on the table.

The 7th Congress (December 2025)

The PCR's 7th Congress, which met in the state of São Paulo in December 2025, shows the present orientation. The decision adopted unanimously redefines the industrial working class as the leading force of the revolution and gives three concrete tasks: triple the membership, make A Verdade weekly, and pass to a tempo of work that is "daily, systematic, and continuous." The finding: "There is no way out inside the limits of capitalism." The tasks: organising in the factories; the struggles against racism, police violence, femicides, the 6x1, and for solidarity with Palestine; the building of Leninist organisations in Latin America in coordination with the CIPOML. The congress's slogan: "We have no time to lose!"

What do we learn from this record?

The CIPOML line's reading of Brazil overlaps with the frame of this piece. The PT governments are compromise governments that widened the working class's gains but did not touch capital's power. Bolsonarism is the bourgeoisie's fascist option in a period of crisis. A united position at the ballot against fascism is necessary. The real question is to build the class's independent organisation in the factory, the neighbourhood, and the school. In the PCR's own language: "The Revolutionary Communist Party is built only in struggle."

A critical note falls to us too. After sixty years of party history and seven years of legal party experience, the highest socialist vote being 0.10 per cent cannot be explained by the media blockade alone. The majority of the Brazilian working class still sees Lula as "one of us." This is the sign of the class's present level of consciousness. The revolutionary left finds the way to go beyond this fact not at the ballot, but, as in the example of the 6x1 movement, by organising the class's daily demands. That a party whose founders were killed under the dictatorship can say today "triple the membership" is, looked at by another measure, continuity.

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Part Nine: The World Is Still Demanding

What happened in Brazil is not the only thing. Over the last two years, under the reactionary wave, masses seeking their rights stood up in every part of the world.

Nepal, September 2025. A Generation Z angered by a social-media ban and by the showy lives of politicians' children took to the street. Dozens of young people were killed. The government fell.

Serbia, 2024–2025. The student movement that began after 16 people died when the canopy of the Novi Sad railway station collapsed became the country's largest mass movement, with occupations lasting months.

Kenya, June 2024. Youth rose against a tax law prepared to an IMF prescription. Parliament was stormed, dozens of people were killed, and the law was withdrawn.

Bangladesh, 2024. The student movement that began against the quota system in public employment brought down fifteen years of Hasina's rule, despite hundreds of dead.

Madagascar, Morocco, Indonesia, Peru, 2025. Cuts of electricity and water, the state of hospitals and schools, deputies' allowances. In all of them Generation Z, in all of them similar flags. In Madagascar the government fell.

The United States, 2025–2026. Millions took to the street in the "No Kings" demonstrations. Neighbourhood resistance against migrant raids, strikes by Amazon and Starbucks workers, Palestine encampments on campuses.

France, 2023–2025. The strike of millions against the raising of the retirement age, and then the "Block Everything" movement.

Turkey, March 2025 and after. The protests that began with the arrest of the Mayor of Istanbul and brought millions into the street. Simultaneous journalists' actions in ten cities. Courier strikes. The actions of doctors and teachers.

Solidarity with Palestine. For two years, every week, hundreds of thousands marched in every city of the world. They could not stop the genocide. But they permanently destroyed the legitimacy of the imperialist order in the eyes of a generation.

Their common points are these. Most are young. Most organise from social media. Most speak with the words "corruption" and "inequality," which is to say they have not yet fully found the language of class, but they stand in the middle of the class reality. And most rise without a lasting organisation and programme, and for that reason have difficulty winning a result. In Nepal the government fell, but the movement could not determine what would come in its place. In Kenya the law was withdrawn, but the IMF remained.

Brazil's difference is here. When the new generation's movement took to the street there, it found opposite it a forty-year workers' party, unions, a landless movement, socialist parties: an organised class infrastructure. The movement pressed this infrastructure, and the infrastructure carried the movement. The result was written into the constitution. Nepal's youth brought down a government. Brazil's youth shortened the working week. The difference is not in the size of the anger. It is in the existence of an organisation to carry the anger. We discussed exactly this in Organising 2.0.

The ruling narrative says "everyone shifted right, the young are apolitical, the working class became fascist." That is not true. People still want water, electricity, a hospital, a job, rest, and dignity, and they risk death for it. What they are looking for is a road that will turn these demands into a lasting gain. Brazil showed a part of that road.

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Part Ten: A Class Assessment

Three questions

In whose hands? In Brazil the head of the state is again in the hands of a leader who comes from the working class. But the means of production — land, mines, banks, the greater part of oil, the media, digital platforms — are in the hands of agribusiness-export capital, finance capital, and foreign monopolies. Congress is in the right's hands, and so are most of the states.

Under whose control? The interest rate of the Central Bank, the ceiling of the fiscal framework, and the currency market draw the limits of economic policy. The dollar's jump on election night was the display of this control. Media groups such as Globo and platforms such as Meta draw the limits of public debate. The only field left outside this control is the organised people themselves: the union, the land camp, the urban occupation, the 6x1 movement in the street.

For whose benefit? Lula's victory is, in the short term, plainly for the benefit of the working class and the poor: 40 hours, the tax exemption, the protection of social programmes, the postponement of opening the Amazon and of an amnesty for those responsible for 8 January. But so long as property relations do not change, this benefit will stay open to being taken back in the next crisis.

What gives hope, what warns

What gives hope	What warns
The candidate who lost the first round won the runoff with three weeks of mobilisation	The fascist candidate took 48%; his movement is the largest party in Congress
The left united on a single target without hiding its differences	The total of every candidate to the left of the PT is 0.17%
The 6x1 was abolished, 40 hours was written into the constitution	It does not touch 38 million informal workers, or the algorithm's seven-day week
Poverty fell from 31% to 23%, and the country left the hunger map	Gini 0.506; billionaires multiplied; land and banks stayed in the same hands
The candidate Trump openly backed was beaten	US intervention will continue with tariffs and sanctions
Bolsonaro was convicted for the coup attempt	His base did not scatter; voices objecting to the result are rising
A new generation produced a class demand in its own language, and won	The force that would turn this energy into a lasting organisation is still weak
Lula held the palace	Capital "voted" with the exchange rate on election night; every law in Congress will pass by bargain

Two halves of the same class

The class map of the election is not a classic class polarisation. It is the class itself splitting in two. Lula's vote came from the Northeast, from the edges of the big cities, from black and women voters, from minimum-wage earners. Flávio's vote came from the agricultural states of the South and the Centre-West, from the evangelical churches, from small property owners, from the families of police and soldiers, from platform "entrepreneurs," and from the fear of the middle class. Part of the 38 million informal workers voted for Lula, and part for Flávio.

For Marxists the real question is this: why does one half of the same class vote for its own enemy? The answer has several layers. First, the PT governments reduced poverty but did not organise class consciousness. They saw the poor person as a "beneficiary," not as a subject. What is not won as a right, what is received as a favour, can also choose the one who will cut the favour, not the one who gives it. Second, the tying of the unions and the movements to the government weakened independent organisation in the neighbourhood. Evangelical churches and militia networks filled the gap. Third, after 2013 the mobilisation "against corruption" turned the class agenda into a moral agenda through Lava Jato. Bolsonarism was built on this moralism. Fourth, platform capitalism declared millions "their own boss" and eroded the material ground of class belonging.

Lulism and Bolsonarism

Both are political forms of dependent Brazilian capitalism. One governs the working class by repression and culture war, the other by compromise and transfer. Neither touches property relations. But the difference between them is vital. Under the first form the worker dies more, earns less, and cannot organise. Under the second the worker dies less, earns a little more, and finds the possibility of organising. The easy line that does not see this difference and says "they are all the same," and the easy line that makes the difference absolute and declares Lula a saviour, both harm the class.

That is why the task before the Brazilian left is two-sided: defend Lula against fascism, organise the class against Lula. These two things look contradictory, but they are not. What the 6x1 movement did is exactly this. The movement demanded of the government, the government dragged its feet, the movement took to the street, and the government and Congress gave way. A distant relation with the government pushes the government forward. Leaning on the government pulls the government to the right.

Lessons for Turkey

Brazil and Turkey are two countries that are surprisingly alike: a similar coup calendar (1960/1964, 1971/1980), a similar dependent industrialisation, a similar sacralisation of politics (evangelicals and religious orders), a similar monopolisation of the media, a similar interest-currency-inflation spiral, a similar liquidation of political rivals with a discourse of "corruption." The differences are instructive too. In Brazil there has been a workers' party continuous since 1980, and a landless movement of millions. In Turkey there is not. In Brazil the judiciary tried the coup attempt. In Turkey 12 September was not tried.

1. Fascism can be stopped at the ballot, but it is not defeated at the ballot. It does not scatter unless the class relations that produce it change. In 2022 too it was said that "Bolsonaro is finished."
2. Social policy does not take the place of class consciousness. A gain can be taken back unless it is defended as a right and with organisation.
3. Tying the union to the government weakens the union. The story of the CUT is no different from the story of the confederations close to the government in Turkey.
4. New movements do not fit the old moulds. The movement that abolished the 6x1 began on a screen. In Turkey the courier actions, the objections in the factory against surveillance, and the actions of doctors and teachers are the signs of the same new form. The socialists' place is inside these movements.
5. An independent class organisation is not built in a day, but without it no gain lasts. As we said in The Bourgeoisie Is Buying Time with Technology, and We Will Bury Capitalism, the subject of history is not technology or a leader. It is organised labour.
6. The algorithm is not beaten from inside. It is marked at the same hour, by real people. In Brazil a deputy's broadcast channel did this. A union, a neighbourhood committee, a courier network can produce the same signal. You do not have to give the command to one person. Do not share before you have watched. When reach drops, keep the screenshot and the date.

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What Can We Do?

1. Tell Brazil properly. Show the two-column table in this piece both to the person around you who says "Lula won, everything is fixed" and to the person who says "they are all the same." Telling hope and the truth together protects both.
2. Make solidarity concrete. Carry the 6x1 experience in Brazil into the debates on working time in Turkey. In a country where a 45-hour week and overtime are ordinary, the demand of "40 hours a week, two days of rest" is not a dream. It is a fact written into the constitution in Brazil.
3. Be inside the new generation's movements. Do not belittle the objections of courier, platform, retail, café, and call-centre workers that begin on social media. Join those objections to a union, to legal support, to networks of solidarity. Our Gig Economy Dossier is a starting point for this work.
4. Put the platform monopolies on the agenda of control, and do not try in vain to beat the algorithm from inside. It was not enough that Meta restricted the official account. The model set against it was not a piece of software. It was real people doing the same act at the same hour. Do not leave this command to a deputy's broadcast channel. The shared hour of a union, a neighbourhood committee, a courier network produces the same signal. Do not share before you have watched. When reach drops, keep the screenshot and the date. That is the work of keeping a record in Meta in Brazil, Access Bans in Turkey.
5. Defend the united position and the independent programme together. A broad unity against fascism is not a weakness. It is maturity. But this unity must not stop the class from voicing its own demands. The Brazilian socialists' principle of "without lowering our flags" holds for us too.
6. Strengthen international links. Follow the publications of the unions, the MST, and the socialist parties in Brazil. Translate them. Share their experience. No country's struggle is won inside its own borders.
7. Organise for continuity. The enthusiasm of an election night fades in a week. The organisation remains. Join a union, an association, a professional chamber, a solidarity network.

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The Ballot Has Closed, the Factory Is Open

Dear Young Comrades,

There were people in front of the prison in Curitiba who for 580 mornings called "Good morning, Lula!" In the rain, in the cold, under the harassment of the police. Most of their names appeared in no newspaper. They were militants from the landless movement, from the unions, from the neighbourhoods. Those mornings did not look like hope to anyone at the time. They looked like stubbornness. Today we know that that stubbornness was the seed of the night of 25 October 2026.

We are passing through a dark period of the world. Inside this darkness a piece of news came from the south of the world, from the country of a poor peasant's child and of a worker who left a finger in the factory: fascism is not inevitable. The masses are still demanding. There is a road.

But Lula is not that road itself. He is a sign of the road. The land is still in the hands of a handful of families, the bank is still in the hands of interest, Congress is still in the hands of the right, and the media and the platforms are still in the hands of capital. What the next four years will be will not be decided in the palace. It will be decided in the factories of the ABC, in the land camps of the Northeast, at the courier stops of São Paulo, and in the favelas of Recife. The road is the road of the youth who abolished the 6x1, of the peasants who occupy the land, of the mothers who protect their child from the police in the favela, of the militants who waited in front of the prison. And that road is the common road of everyone seeking their rights, from Brazil to Nepal, from Kenya to Turkey.

Let us borrow the present slogan of a party founded in Recife sixty years ago, whose founders were killed under torture: We have no time to lose.

Hope came from the south. Now is the time to organise it everywhere. The ballot has closed. The factory is open.

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