'The scenario is one of a preliminary round,' admits the president of the PT in São Paulo.

Even with former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva working behind the scenes against holding primaries, the president of the São Paulo PT (Workers' Party) directory, councilman Antonio Donato, believes that the party will only define the name of its candidate for mayor of São Paulo on November 27th, the date scheduled for the first internal contest. "There's a lot of discussion and a lot of possibility of it evolving (towards a single nomination), but the scenario today is one of primaries," assessed the councilman. This morning, Donato and nine other PT council members met with the Minister of Science, Technology and Innovation, Aloizio Mercadante, to discuss the party's strategies for 2012.

Currently, the PT's (Workers' Party) caucus of 11 council members in the City Council does not have a consensus candidate. Federal deputy Jilmar Tatto has the open support of three council members; the Minister of Education, Fernando Haddad, has the support of three parliamentarians, and the other five members of the caucus have not yet declared their preference. Besides Tatto and Haddad, deputy Carlos Zarattini and senators Eduardo and Marta Suplicy are also willing to compete to succeed Mayor Gilberto Kassab. The former mayor leads in a voting intention poll released today by Datafolha. "The poll shows a very good situation for us, but there is still a lot of time left and polls change. This result does not eliminate any of the pre-candidates from the race," assessed the leader.

Unity -- Approved yesterday, the 4th, at the PT's 4th Congress, the guideline that opens the door for alliances with opposition parties will not lead the São Paulo city directorate to reconsider a future partnership with Mayor Kassab's PSD. "The PSD is out of the question. It would be schizophrenic for Mayor Gilberto Kassab to support a project that opposes his own," emphasized Donato. For the councilman, the party's lead in the voting intention poll released today does not outweigh the satisfaction of seeing Kassab's approval rating reach only 24% of the electorate. "The most important thing about the poll is that Kassab continues to fall," he stated.

After meeting with Mercadante, Donato believes the caucus left convinced of the importance of working towards PT unity, with or without primaries. "We will work to have a smooth process, and the caucus can be a guarantor of this process," he said.