As the Brazilian economy stalls, a deep political crisis is engulfing the governing Workers’ Party (PT). The conservative opposition in the chamber of deputies on Sunday voted to impeach Dilma Rousseff, the president and former guerrilla fighter, who stands accused of hiding the true size of the budget deficit.

Prosecutors say that they have unearthed a billion-dollar corruption scandal, implicating former president Lula and Rousseff. Others in her party have been involved in dirty dealings with the oil company Petrobras.

“It is an ‘institutional’ … coup d’État”, Fabio Mascaro Querido, an author and activist based in São Paulo, tells Red Flag. The vote was only the first step towards impeachment. The motion will now be considered by the senate. If it passes, the Workers’ Party will be out of office for the first time since 2002.

“All this shows that the dominant classes are ready to … impose a government whose principle intention is to intensify attacks on workers and drastically reduce state spending on public services and welfare”, Querido says.

For nearly a decade, Brazil’s economy grew steadily, helped by high commodity prices and strong demand from China. “Lula’s government put into practice his politics of class conciliation, attending to the interests of the high bourgeoisie while at the same time trying to minimise the pauperisation of the poorest”, he says.

But in recent times, the changing economic fortunes of the country have created profound problems for the governing Worker’s Party:

“After a period where the dominant classes had accepted Lula and the PT … the conditions for the continuity of this ‘social pact’ have broken down – above all after large demonstrations that revealed widespread middle class discontent with the government. It is in this context that the offensive of the right began against Roussef’s government and against the PT, at a moment where the party (along with many others, including the right wing opposition) is suffering from grave accusations of corruption.”

Faced with the worst recession since the 1930s, Brazilian capitalists want spending cuts, tax hikes and attacks on labour rights. They don’t have any confidence that the PT can deliver.

The political turmoil, which is the result of the economy’s problems, is in turn paralysing economic activity. “The economic and political crises are tightly linked, creating an impasse for the country, which the simple fall of the government and its replacement by the traditional right won’t be able to solve”, Querido says.

When the Workers’ Party took office in 2002, it did so by mobilising around a project of class collaboration and accepting the most corrupt methods of political jockeying. By the end of Lula’s rule, the party had been transformed greatly, and so too had the hopes it had raised among workers, landless peasants and the left.

Things didn’t begin this way for the PT. It was a party born of a wave of metalworkers’ strikes in the late 1970s. Querido explains:

“The PT was born in 1980, being the result of the coming together of the ‘new unionism’ of the metal-workers (where Lula was), class struggle unionism, the catholic left (originating in liberation theology) and anti-Stalinist political tendencies, including each Trotskyist current (Mandelite, Lambertist, Morenist).

“This was a first for Brazil: a mass party that, although resting on a certain strategic void (it said it was for ‘democratic socialism’), left no doubt about its class perspective, in opposition to ‘collaborationist’ traditions that had until then dominated the Brazilian workers’ movement, tied to labour-like parties (Brazilian social democracy) and the communist party.”

The party’s early slogan, “Worker, vote for a worker”, expressed independent class politics. But by the 1990s, things began to change. A tendency towards electoralism was established and only grew stronger, culminating in Lula’s election. “At this moment, the leadership of the party no longer proposed any kind of rupture, not even with neoliberalism”, Querido says. “But there were still many people, for the most part workers and the youth, who had hope for the possibilities that could be opened by Lula’s victory.”

In 2003, far left militants who opposed the course of the new government were expelled from the party. They formed the PSOL, the Party of Socialism and Freedom, in 2004. It became the largest (although very small compared with the PT) left opposition party to the government. The PT further shifted to the right:

“They became the partners in crime with the high bourgeoisie that today no longer wants them, since they no longer have the political ability, in the context of economic crisis, to balance the interests of workers and bosses. From 2014, the financial markets and big business declared war on the government.

“For the political right, the question of corruption is only smoke and mirrors to bring down – through a parliamentary or judicial coup d’État – a government that is too ‘interventionist’ (which is not even the case). After all, the right is just as or even more corrupted than the PT [a third of all members in the chamber of deputies face corruption allegations].”

The case of Eduardo Cunha, president of the chamber of deputies, shows the hypocrisy. Here is a man that has taken millions of dollars in bribes from Petrobras, using the money to pay off the Cunha family credit card debt of US$156,000. He also lied to congress about Swiss bank accounts, which he is accused of using to hide $40 million in bribes. Yet this is the man leading the charges against Rousseff and the Worker’s Party. He has set the procedures for the impeachment and will oversee the vote.

Michel Temer, the vice president caught rehearsing the speech he would give “when” he replaces Rousseff, is caught up in an illegal ethanol-purchasing scheme. He has been undermining the government with the support of big business and is leading the charge to introduce anti-worker laws and austerity.

Whatever economic program a new government – if the PT is brought down by the senate – imposes, it will lack popular, democratic legitimacy. The president “would have to face off against the resistance of the workers’ movement, youth and other social movements, including those who were until now constrained by their leaders, who were tied to the PT and the government”, says Querido. “To impose these measures, an eventual Temer/Cunha government would have to intensify the repression and criminalisation of the social and political movements of resistance.”

The PT’s unholy alliance with capital in previous years means that today it is utterly disoriented by the political crisis. It is “making appeals to the social movements to defend a government that – while it says it wants to resist the right wing offensive – has cut social spending by attacking the rights of workers and the poorest layers of the population”.

Querido says that we are witnessing the beginning of the end of the PT’s hegemony – “at least as it is known today” – in the workers’ movement, in the social movements and among the left generally. “There are no longer the economic and political conditions for reconciliation! The PT can no longer be the ‘guardian’ of bourgeois order, while at the same time it can no longer represent the struggles of the workers’ movement.”

It is crucial to see that the PT’s hegemony has had negative consequences. The leadership of the movements, says Querido, “totally aligned themselves with the interests of the government, which was an obstacle to the recomposition of a left capable of struggling against the attacks led by the governing PT itself.

“That has not prevented, evidently, the emergence of new, very radical, social movements to the left of the government, like the movement of homeless workers (today one of the movements with the greatest ability to mobilise), or even the revolt of the rank and file of the unions and movements aligned with the government”, he says.

“But they are not yet able to fill the void left by the PT. In any case, the struggle against the foreseeable attacks on the rights of workers, along with the counter-attack against the reactionary and anti-democratic offensive, could open new possibilities for the recomposition of the radical left.

“The class struggle, which has always existed, but which remained hidden behind the relative success of the Lula years, will return to the centre of political debate. We are at the beginning of a new conflict over the division of wealth … We can wager that, like Daniel Bensaïd always said, the ‘return’ of the class struggle could open new horizons for the anti-capitalists and revolutionaries in Brazil.”

It is useful to consider the state of Brazil’s far left, the largest and most important organisation being the PSOL. Querido says that it is “a kind of reprint of the PT from the 1990s, although much smaller, with many internal currents (including those tied to the Fourth International), but without the power and ability to unify like the PT had”.

As well as the PSOL there is the Morenist – the Trotskyist current historically tied to Nahuel Moreno – Unified Socialist Workers’ Party, with around 2,500 militants.

However, these groups have faced problems. On the whole, they have not yet been able to pose a real alternative to the PT. The task for the radical left, Querido says, “is to show that there is no contradiction in struggling both against the reactionary and anti-democratic offensive of the right, the media, and judiciary, and against corruption and the attacks led by the government itself. It is there that the radical left could influence the struggles”.