São Paulo was a pivotal urban setting in the account of Brazil’s transition from military rule: a 1979 gathering there helped bring diverse opposition groups into a shared political project, and the city later became one of the large municipalities governed by the Workers’ Party. Its significance lies not simply in its size or electoral role, but in its place within a broader process of organizing that linked workplace demands, social movements, and national democratic change.

A Meeting Ground for Political Organization

On August 18, 1979, a meeting in São Paulo brought together former opposition politicians, union leaders, students, intellectuals, and representatives of one hundred social movements that had begun organizing across Brazil during the 1970s. They met to discuss forming the Workers’ Party. The range of participants reflected an effort to build a political vehicle beyond the trade-union movement alone, drawing together groups that opposed military rule and sought to change Brazilian society.

The gathering followed the resurgence of labor organizing, of which the Scânia factory strike was an early sign. Although such strikes centered on wages, their political effect was broader: workers’ collective action helped renew civil society and connect labor demands to opposition activity. São Paulo’s meeting gave this widening coalition a concrete organizational focus.

The Workers’ Party Takes Shape

The party was launched in October 1979 at the São Judas Tadeo restaurant in São Bernardo, in the São Paulo area. Lula insisted that it should represent not only trade unionists but wage earners and poor people more generally. The project therefore joined union leaders’ efforts to create a political platform with social movements taking shape around the country.

That coalition continued to develop as the military cautiously organized a political opening. In the 1982 local elections, the Workers’ Party ran candidates for the first time and won two mayoral races. By 1988 it governed thirty-six municipalities, including São Paulo and Porto Alegre. The city’s inclusion among these large urban centers marked the party’s movement from an organizing initiative to a presence in local government.

From Local Mobilization to National Change

The book places the organizing associated with São Paulo within a longer process of empowerment. Brazil’s transition differed from the English and French cases discussed for comparison: it did not begin with a single radical revolution that transformed institutions at once. Instead, mobilization rooted in workplaces and local movements helped build a broad coalition, and that grassroots process contributed to the transition from military rule to democracy.

The distinction is consequential in the account. A return to elections alone does not guarantee pluralism. Brazil’s broader mobilization helped connect democratization with more inclusive political institutions, civic participation, public services, and educational expansion. São Paulo thus appears as both a practical center of coalition-building and part of a wider national change whose force came from organized participation beyond established political elites.