The Porto Alegre Thermidor: Brazil's 'Participatory Budget' at the crossroads

Abstract

The 'Participatory Budget' experience in Brazil, directly associated with the rise of the Workers Party (PT) over the past two decades, has become a focus of world-wide attention for the Left. This is especially the case with Porto Alegre, the city which has hosted the World Social Forum meetings where antiglobalization activists from every continent have come together to declare that 'another world is possible'. In this essay, I intend to present an array of problems for discussion--all based on the hypothesis that the Participatory Budget (PB) experience in Porto Alegre faces a thermidorian phase: a situation in which the PB's transformative process will be dramatically challenged by internal and external constraints. Radical republicanism of the Tocquevillean type, the notion of a 'non-state public sphere', where the state at the local level is open to the participation of all members of society, runs the risk of being side-tracked by an old impulse: to put the plebeians back 'in their place'--despite the local PT-led Popular Front government's efforts to increase the number of participants. I believe that by studying the current limits of the experience of Porto Alegre it is possible to shed some light on the potential directions of democratic radicalization for the popular classes.