MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Rousseff and Lula da Silva try to convince the party to support austerity measures

“We are here to show that the Workers’ Party is alive and prepared for new challenges. Injured, yes, but alive,” Lula da Silva said.

Brazil's embattled president Dilma Rousseff with the help of her political mentor. Lula da Silva managed on Thursday night to plea support from the ruling Workers Party, WP, delegates for drastic spending cuts designed to restore confidence in Latin America's largest but battered economy.

 Rousseff is cutting spending to preserve Brazil’s investment grade credit rating as the economy slips into recession. But the austerity measures have antagonized party faithful who see them as a sellout to banks and political conservatives they have long criticized, and thus Thursday night's congress was crucial.

“I haven’t switched sides,” Rousseff said Thursday near midnight at the WP convention in the state of Bahia. Rousseff said the measures are needed to protect the party’s broader goals of lifting the poor through expanded social welfare spending.

The plea for support from her own party underscores the difficult political environment facing the leader in her second term, which began in January. The economy is forecast to shrink 1.3% this year, biggest contraction in 25 years and her popularity has plunged amid an alleged $2.1 billion bribery scandal at the state oil firm Petrobras.

For the president repairing relations with her party has become an urgent priority particularly since the man chosen to run the economy is an orthodox Chicago graduate, Joaquim Levy, who is pushing through the tightest budget in years with draconian cuts in welfare and workers' benefits.

No wonder she cut short the EU/Celac summit in Brussels on Thursday to fly back to Brazil to speak at the convention.

In the convention’s opening speech, Workers’ Party President Rui Falcão stated opposition to policies which many party faithful believe would empower the wealthy at the middle class’s expense. “It is not admissible, for us, an economic policy that is hard on the weak and soft on the strong,” he said.

Rousseff’s proposed spending cuts, supported by more conservative lawmakers are hurting: for one conservatives are already building support for laws such as making it easier to outsource workers and allowing judges to send minors to prison, all opposed by the Workers’ Party.

Much of the effort to heal divisions in the party has fallen to its charismatic co-founder, the former president Lula da Silva, who also spoke late Thursday. However illustrating the party’s charged internal climate, Lula da Silva, a normally a spontaneous speaker, apologized for reading a prepared speech.

He feared his emotions might get the best of him and he could say something he’d regret. “We are here to show that the Workers’ Party is alive and prepared for new challenges. Injured, yes, but alive,” Lula da Silva said.

He described the current austerity approach as “a tactical movement” to face the crisis and underlined that “the party is a party forged by workers. And it is ready to understand that many times circumstances impose tactics to achieve strategic objectives which for us is development”.

He added that the government measures must be supported even when they put at risk many of the social conquests.

Rousseff went further and blasted “we're a government that has the courage of making adjustments and these adjustments are intended to give sustention, continuity and to keep pushing forward the development project we set on rails back in 2003”.