Word: pt
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...because the PT's candidate has made it clear that his priority will his social agenda, particularly alleviating the burden of an unemployment rate that hovers close to 20 percent. Spiraling unemployment has been the downside of the free-market policies implemented by President Fernando Henrique Cardoso, and has swung voters more solidly behind the PT. It's an issue that Lula, a self-taught blue collar worker and trade unionist before becoming the beacon of the Brazilian Left, understands better than any of the other candidates - and certainly better than most international investors. "If international economists were always right...
...Lula and the U.S. ever warm to each other? "Our elites still have the mentality of colonists," Lula told TIME. "Latin America has to quit treating the U.S. as an empire." In the interview, the PT candidate made it clear that, if he's elected, George W. Bush may have to wait beyond the current 2005 deadline to achieve a hemisphere-wide free-trade pact - especially since, as he notes, Bush preaches free trade to Brazil yet still maintains high tariffs against Brazil's most competitive products, steel and frozen orange juice. Which means the only choice Washington seems...
Traditionally the Cinderella candidate in Brazilian elections, this time the socialist leader Luiz In?cio Lula da Silva is the favorite to win. Indeed, the Workers' Party (PT) candidate's current 25 point lead over his closest challenger, Jos? Serra of the ruling Social Democratic Party, suggests that Lula may already have amassed enough support to win the presidency in the first round of balloting on October 6. And the prospect of his victory has the international community paying more attention than ever to Brazil's fourth election since the country's returned from military dictatorship to democracy...
...reason for the Workers' Party (PT) candidate's commanding lead is simple: The state of the economy. It may be Latin America's largest economy (and the world's tenth-largest) but Brazil goes to the polls amid financial turbulence caused by the ripple effects of the Argentinean meltdown. Last month, the credit rating agency Moody's dropped Brazil's foreign currency bonds to five levels below investment grade, making it even more difficult for the government to borrow money and putting additional pressure on Brazil's foreign currency reserves. This despite the fact that many of the fundamentals remain...
...Still, international investors are skittish about the possibility that a Lula victory may result in a default on the country's foreign debt obligations. The PT candidate had, in fact, called for such a default in his early years on the campaign trail in the late 1980s, but since then has, like many erstwhile socialists from the developing world, accepted the basic ground rules of the international financial system. Still, investor anxiety has sent Brazil's currency, the Real, into its sharpest decline since it was allowed to float freely against the dollar...