Fernando Collor

Fernando Collor is identified as Lula’s opponent in the 1989 presidential runoff, the first free presidential election in Brazil since the military coup. Collor won that contest, but the book places the result within a longer account of how the Workers’ Party assembled a broad political coalition and later gained national power.

The 1989 Election

The Workers’ Party fielded Lula as its presidential candidate in 1989. He received 16 percent of the vote in the first round and advanced to a runoff against Fernando Collor, where he won 44 percent. The account establishes Collor’s role and the election’s outcome, but provides no further information about his campaign, background, or actions in office.

A Contest Within a Political Opening

The election followed the party’s emergence during Brazil’s gradual return to democracy in the 1980s. Founded in 1979 through the convergence of organized labor, opposition politicians, students, intellectuals, and representatives of social movements, the Workers’ Party began contesting local elections in 1982. By 1988 it governed thirty-six municipalities, among them São Paulo and Porto Alegre. Lula’s 1989 candidacy therefore represented a national step in a political organization already building support through local electoral participation.

Defeat and Later Victory

Lula also lost the presidential elections of 1994 and 1998, this time to Fernando Henrique Cardoso, before winning the presidency in 2002. The contrast situates Collor’s 1989 victory as one result in a changing political landscape, not the end of the Workers’ Party’s electoral development. The party’s growing local presence and its ties to social movements helped translate political mobilization into later national success.

The Account’s Emphasis

The passage gives little individual characterization of Collor: his significance here is the specific electoral fact that he defeated Lula in the 1989 runoff. Its broader attention falls on the Workers’ Party’s coalition and its experience in government. In Porto Alegre, its first administration after 1988 introduced participatory budgeting, involving ordinary citizens in setting spending priorities; the model was associated with stronger local accountability, improved public services, and a better quality of life. The party’s rise was also linked to wider changes in Brazil: poverty fell from 45 percent to 30 percent between 1990 and 2006, inequality declined, and average schooling rose from six years in 1995 to eight in 2006. These developments form the larger political and economic context against which the book recalls Collor’s runoff victory.