Article: The presidential dispute in 2002: analysis of the conjuncture

Abstract

Starting from some elaborations of Wanderley Guilherme dos Santos, 1 analyze the electoral conjuncture of 2002 around the presidential dispute. For its characteristics and protagonists, these elections acquired a strategic importance that overflows the national borders. The background in which the main candidacies moved configured a certain polarization between market and citizenship. The economic power and the finance markets intended to impose the continuity, while the urns would demand changes. A heterodox politics ofalliances does not just complicate the electoral preferences, but it prefigures political realignments to some degree surprising. Such ajustments can either make the conquest ofthe government possible or determine which direction will prevail: renewal and change or "continuismo". If from the complex web of political movements of the campaign neither the entire sense of the future government arises nor its politics are completely revealed, I try here to delineate the processes, the actors and the circumstances that will conform it the options, both the ones that constrain it as well as the ones that promote it to political action.