Lula divides, surpasses, and does not fear the PT's militants.

247 – At least one element was missing from the calculations made by former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva to execute his plan to directly interfere in the negotiations for launching mayoral candidates in São Paulo and Recife: the PT's (Workers' Party) grassroots activists, who are beginning to confront him. In different parts of Brazil, from São Paulo to Recife, but also including Porto Alegre and Belo Horizonte, PT members who work daily at the party's grassroots level are showing, each in their own way, that Lula's dictates are not at all in line with what they truly want.

Nationally, an image of a poster with the words "Lula, you don't rule Recife" marked the rally in support of Mayor João da Costa on Thursday the 7th, which gathered thousands of people at the airport in the capital of Pernambuco. With this kind of support, Costa announced his entry into the National Directorate of the party with a protest against the imposition, orchestrated by Lula, of Senator Humberto Costa's candidacy in place of his own in the Municipal Directorate. Silently, but practically completely detached from Fernando Haddad's candidacy, the party's activists in the country's largest city are also refusing to accept the name imposed by Lula. So far, no major public demonstration in his favor has occurred. In Belo Horizonte, the situation is one of total division: the party will hold a meeting on Sunday the 10th to choose a candidate for vice-mayor, on Marcio Lacerda's ticket (PSB), from among no fewer than seven pre-candidates. Previously, the party had already faced a first division when it blocked the candidacy of the current vice-mayor, Roberto Carvalho, for mayor by a vote of 6 to 4 in the Municipal Directorate. At that time, Lula preferred not to interfere. In Porto Alegre, congresswoman Manuela D'Ávila, from the PCdoB, was left high and dry instead of the alliance with the PT promised by Governor Tarso Genro. "Here, until the last moment, we insisted on unity," she said, considering the candidacy of the PT member Adão Villaverde legitimate. No message from Lula was seen in the capital of the pampas to guide opinions.

Playing with a heavy hand, as in the cases of Recife and São Paulo, or excluding himself from the process, as is happening in Belo Horizonte and Porto Alegre, Lula is working as if there were no party activists – and, in this sense, the absence of this element in his political calculations is not unintentional, but deliberate. What Lula is doing is paving the way, in his own way, for an alliance with the PSB of Governor Eduardo Campos, currently the main agenda-setter for the PT's actions. In gratitude for the split in Recife, Lula envisions Campos as his running mate in a possible presidential election in 2014. The former president has always believed himself to be, personally, bigger than the PT party. For him, having the party activists against him now doesn't make that much difference, since, in his calculations, these same activists will have to unite in his favor in 2014, because there will be no other alternative. Infallible in the past, this formula, given the potential defeats of Lula and his candidates in 2012 – plus another 'detail' called the re-election of President Dilma Rousseff – tends to be questioned more and more strongly.