Workers' Party (Brazil)

The Workers' Party (Portuguese: Partido dos Trabalhadores, PT) is a centre-left political party in Brazil that is currently the country's ruling party. Some scholars classify its ideology in the 21st century as social democracy, with the party shifting from a broadly socialist ideology in the 1990s, although the party retains a left-wing and marginal far-left faction to this day. Founded in 1980, PT governed at the federal level in a coalition government with several other parties from January 1, 2003, to August 31, 2016. After the 2002 parliamentary election, PT became the largest party in the Chamber of Deputies and the largest in the Federal Senate for the first time. With the highest approval rating in the history of the country at one time, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was PT's most prominent member. Dilma Rousseff, also a member of PT, was elected President twice (first on October 31, 2010, and then again on October 26, 2014) but did not finish her second term due to her impeachment in 2016. The party came back to power with Lula's victory in the 2022 presidential election.

The party has been involved in a number of corruption scandals since Lula first came to power and saw its popular support plummet between 2015 and 2020, with presidential approval ratings falling from over 80% to 9% and successive reductions in all elected offices since 2014. The 2022 general election marked a turning point in that trajectory.

The party symbols are a five-pointed red star inscribed with the initials "PT" in the center; a red flag with a white star also with the initials in the center; and the Workers Party's anthem. Its Superior Electoral Court (TSE) identification number is 13. Members and sympathisers of the party are known as "Petistas".

The Workers' Party was launched by a heterogeneous group made up of militants opposed to Brazil's military government, trade unionists, left-wing intellectuals and artists and Catholics linked to the liberation theology on February 10, 1980, at Colégio Sion in São Paulo, a private Catholic school for girls. The party emerged as a result of the approach between the labor movements in the ABC Region such as the Conferência das Classes Trabalhadoras (Conclat), later developed into the Central Única dos Trabalhadores (CUT) which carried major strikes from 1978 to 1980; and the old Brazilian left-wing, whose proponents, many of whom were journalists, intellectuals, artists and union organizers, were returning from exile with the 1979 Amnesty law, many of them having endured imprisonment and torture at the hands of the military regime in addition to years of exile. Dilma Rousseff herself was imprisoned and tortured by the dictatorship.

PT was born by historical need. PT is not an accident. The future of Brazil goes through a party with the same program as PT, under any name whatsoever, under any leader whomsoever.

— Claudio Solano, journalist

PT was launched under a democratic socialism trend. After the 1964 coup d'état, Brazil's main federation of labor unions, the General Command of Workers (Comando Geral dos Trabalhadores – CGT), which gathered leaders approved by the Ministry of Labour since its formation, a practice tied to the fact that since Getúlio Vargas' Estado Novo, unions had become quasi-state entities, was dissolved while unions themselves suffered intervention of the military regime.

The resurgence of an organized labour movement, evidenced by strikes in the ABC Region on the late 1970s led by Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, enabled the reorganization of the labour movement without the direct interference of the state. The movement originally sought to act exclusively in union politics, but the survival of a conservative unionism under the domination of the state (evidenced in the refoundation of CGT) and the influence exercised over the trade union movement by leaders of traditional left-wing parties, such as the Brazilian Communist Party (Partido Comunista Brasileiro, PCB), forced the unionist movement of ABC, encouraged by anti-Stalinist leaders, to organize its own party.