Sovereign directions for a new leap in development
Contribution to the Lula for president 2026 campaign program
Also read: PCdoB takes the field for Lula and for greater progressive strength in Congress (click the link)
The Communist Party of Brazil (PCdoB) is actively participating in and politically converging around the preparation of the participatory government plan for the 2026 Lula campaign, currently being developed by the foundations of PT, PCdoB, PSB, PV, PDT and REDE. At the same time, the Party considers it necessary to set out its own position, highlighting the central structural elements at stake in the struggle over the future. Around these elements, it puts forward the political proposals it considers most decisive, without prejudice to the many others being formulated through its participation in the 13 thematic and cross-cutting groups of the participatory plan.
PCdoB considers that the national reconstruction government, led by President Lula from 2023 to 2026, has played a decisive role. It took over a country profoundly weakened by a regressive phase, begun with the 2016 coup against President Dilma Rousseff and worsened during the Bolsonaro government. During that period, the national state underwent an unprecedented dismantling, marked by the spending cap (Constitutional Amendment Proposal No. 241, PEC 241), the “autonomy” of the Central Bank, labor reform, the weakening of the Brazilian Development Bank (BNDES) and Petrobras and, finally, the January 8, 2023 coup attempt against democracy, which resulted in the arrest of its principal organizers. This destructive action by the Bolsonaro family persists and is intensifying, with the support of U.S. President Donald Trump, targeting national sovereignty and democracy.
With solid democratic credentials, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva resumed the development agenda and reaffirmed his commitment and high sense of public duty. By confronting the threat to the Democratic Rule of Law and placing emphasis on the defense of national sovereignty, he preserved institutional normality and brought together broad political and social forces for national reconstruction. At the same time, he resumed the economic agenda and reaffirmed his historic commitment to reducing social inequalities.
Compared with the governments of former Presidents Michel Temer and Jair Bolsonaro, the balance of the period is overwhelmingly positive. Its significance is even greater because the advances took place in an economic and political environment predominantly adverse to the project approved at the polls, which limited the possibility of deep and rapid changes.
We are confident that the electorate will recognize this reality. President Lula’s new term will be a fundamental point of reference for national sovereignty, for consolidating democracy and for raising the people’s quality of life.
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The government’s achievements provide a solid foundation for moving forward. However, the current model of economic growth is insufficient and is approaching its limits. Economic and social gains remain constrained by the prevailing macroeconomic regime. Monetary policy keeps the benchmark interest rate among the highest in the world, discourages productive investment and transfers approximately R$ 1 trillion a year (approximately USD 193.36 billion at current rates) in public resources to a small segment of society and to foreign speculators, thereby deepening the concentration of income and power.
At the same time, the fiscal regime remains guided by rigid short-term targets, restricting public investment and social policies. This weakens the state’s capacity to drive development, guarantee rights, improve people’s lives and sustain democratic confidence.
This is the time to project the future, offer a secure direction and renew the hopes of millions of Brazilian men and women for a better life and a thriving nation.
Brazil needs a vigorous growth strategy centered on productive, industrial and technological transformation; energy diversification and security; environmental sustainability; the valorization of labor; culture and the creative industries; the reduction of inequalities; and the eradication of extreme poverty.
It also requires an advanced democracy, with social and political substance, which overcomes subordination to oligarchic interests that condition political representation and popular participation and institutionally limit the national capacity to promote economic progress with social justice.
National sovereignty and a robust democracy are indispensable means for maintaining and expanding the social gains of the Brazilian people, improving people’s lives and providing a more prosperous and clearly defined horizon for the future.
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The next Lula government can open the door to another stage in national life: a new cycle of sovereign development capable of raising Brazil to a new level in the face of the profound transformations under way in the contemporary world.
The exhaustion of the neoliberal cycle, evident since the 2007–2008 global crisis, concentrated income and deepened inequalities and the precariousness of labor. Internationally, geopolitical tensions, instability in the world order and armed conflicts are intensifying. In response to its relative decline, U.S. imperialism is increasing pressure on Latin America and other regions in an effort to preserve its dominant position.
In this scenario, it is essential that Brazil consolidates a sovereign project that will enable it to attain the status of a fully developed country, assert its national interests, reduce vulnerabilities and resume the strengthening of South American regional integration. Ultimately, it must strengthen its strategic autonomy and the strong deterrent role required of the Armed Forces.
This means taking advantage of the opportunities opened up by the emergence of new coalitions in the Global South, capable of expanding Brazil’s alternatives for international engagement and contributing to overcoming its semi-peripheral position in global value chains.
Among the most important achievements of the current term is the recovery of Brazil’s international prestige. Under President Lula’s leadership, the country has once again become a strong voice in the world in defense of peace, democracy, the sovereignty of peoples, the fight against hunger, environmental sustainability and balanced multilateralism. This action projects Brazil as a democratic reference point and strengthens its presence in forums such as BRICS+, the G20 and various multilateral initiatives.
Brazil needs structural changes to confront the obstacles posed by the current system in the economic, political and social spheres, as well as by the demands of financial and pro-imperialist circles. Under this framework, the economy has grown at mediocre rates in recent decades since the neoliberal orientation was implemented, whose essence was to weaken the country’s independence and bind the state even more tightly to the chains of financialization.
The consequences extended beyond the economic sphere. They contributed to the erosion of democratic institutions and opened space for attempts to challenge democracy itself, culminating in the January 8, 2023 coup attempt.
Debate within the government, across all institutions and throughout society on democratic structural reforms of the national state is a requirement for moving forward.
Once democratic institutional reconstruction has been carried out and the dismantling of economic and social public policies has been reversed, the next government will create the conditions for bringing forces together and unleashing a new phase of economic growth that can take the nation to a new civilizational level.
It is increasingly evident that progress is possible only through the mobilization of broad social, political, economic and cultural forces. This raises the necessary struggle in society to a new level. President Lula is the leader required for this historic moment.
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The fundamental premise of this project is to build a better life for the people, both in the material dimension and in the cultural and spiritual dimensions, especially for those who live off their labor.
This premise gives rise to the historic commitment of progressive, democratic and left-wing forces to building a humanist society founded on the full realization of social, civil and human rights. This includes women’s struggle for equality and against all forms of violence; combating racism and promoting the rights of the Black population; defending Indigenous peoples; guaranteeing the rights of LGBTQIA+ people; and protecting religious freedom.
A government program committed to national transformation must project a future of upward social mobility, the valorization of labor and income, the strengthening of culture in its symbolic, economic and civic dimensions, the consolidation of social and civil rights and the achievement of new rights. It ought to also promote more humane cities, ensure stability in collective life, strengthen public security, protect national interests and consolidate democracy.
Without a new and higher cycle of sustained economic growth, it is not possible to renew expectations or expand the rights that have been won. Only a lasting development process will make it possible to achieve greater social and regional equality, confront the extreme concentration of income, strengthen national defense, wage a vigorous and relentless struggle against criminal organizations resulting in the recovery of territories under their control, overcome the enormous infrastructure and logistics bottlenecks and achieve greater territorial integration, with the Amazon as a strategic space for protection and sovereign, sustainable development.
These are the essential contents of the proposal for sovereign directions for Brazil. PCdoB considers that, before and above all, it is necessary to mobilize the awareness, organization and participation in political life of workers, young people, the scientific community, productive sectors, and democratic and patriotic forces, so that they converge in a broad majority movement of civil society—the foundation of the major social concertation that are indispensable and capable of sustaining a new stage of development and national sovereignty.
The electoral contest is the beginning of this path, involving an intense political, social and ideological struggle to remove the obstacles that block the country’s development. The campaign program is required to present not only the objectives but also the means capable of making them convincing and feasible for the broad majority of Brazilians.
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The three axes proposed here for a new stage of national development center the strategic role of the national state as an agent of investment, inducement, planning and coordination of economic development, articulated with democratic deepening and the valorization of labor as engines of progress.
This formulation simultaneously considers the requirements of the country’s sovereign development and the geopolitical context of transition toward a multipolar international order. In this setting, Brazil’s strategic interests are increasingly contested because of its regional relevance, its leading role in BRICS+ and its active participation in Global South initiatives.
The first axis consists of preparing a national development plan to be formulated in the first months of the new government.
Internal and external challenges require a qualitative leap in the state’s capacity for planning and strategic coordination. National development cannot depend exclusively on the spontaneous movements of the market. It requires political direction, institutional capacity and clearly defined objectives.
The formulation of the plan must incorporate the lessons learned from recent experiences, valuing their successes and confronting their limitations. It must be prepared through broad dialogue with civil society, workers, the scientific community, business sectors and public institutions committed to national development.
The national development plan must guide the integrated action of the entire government through targets translated into programs, missions and structural projects. At its core will be a sectoral and regional public investment strategy capable of inducing private investment, attracting foreign capital aligned with national objectives, accelerating productive modernization and reducing social and territorial inequalities.
The plan must establish economic growth targets, a financing model and mechanisms, regulatory improvements, identification of the main institutional bottlenecks and definition of the instruments needed to overcome them. It must also include a permanent monitoring body directly linked to the Office of the President of the Republic.
Energy diversification and security constitute another decisive pillar of this strategy. The country needs to expand its capacity for public coordination over the oil and gas segments and over the generation, transmission and distribution of electricity, in order to reduce costs for the economy, increase productive competitiveness and ensure an energy transition compatible with sustainable growth. In this context, the selective review of privatizations should be considered whenever the country’s strategic interests so require.
The second axis is a systemic policy for productive and technological reconfiguration, centered on manufacturing industry and modern services, especially those intensive in knowledge, information and data management.
The resumption of industrial policy through the New Industry Brazil (NIB) plan represented a significant step by placing productive development at the center of the national agenda and making explicit the main bottlenecks to be addressed. The next stage requires deepening and updating this strategy based on a guiding principle with five central guidelines.
The guiding principle is to articulate productivity and competitiveness objectives with an effective improvement in the population’s living conditions. Industrial policy must be explicitly oriented toward generating qualified jobs, reducing social and regional inequalities, democratizing access to essential goods and services such as health care, housing, urban mobility and adequate food, and strengthening national development capabilities.
The first guideline is to raise the level of political coordination of the industrial strategy, consolidating effective mechanisms for interministerial coordination and removing institutional obstacles that hinder its implementation.
The second consists of making full use of the state’s purchasing and contracting power as an instrument of productive transformation. The predictability of public demand over time is a decisive condition for stimulating innovation, expanding productive capacity and making investments compatible with national objectives.
The third guideline is to ensure more favorable conditions for companies with national capital in accessing government procurement and local-content policies. These are the companies that should, as a priority, expand their technological capacity, develop solutions suited to the country’s needs, strengthen domestic production chains, improve the quality of employment and contribute to Brazil’s strategic autonomy.
In this regard, it is imperative to reassess the elimination, carried out in 1995, of the legal distinction between Brazilian companies with national capital and companies controlled by foreign capital, adapting regulatory and public-policy instruments to the requirements of a national development strategy.
The fourth guideline is to establish objective and measurable targets. The missions of New Industry Brazil are important for the integration of economic and social objectives, but they must be accompanied by quantitative indicators capable of guiding government action and measuring results. These include annual targets for expanding employment in industry and modern services, as well as increasing the share of manufacturing industry in the composition of Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
The fifth guideline is to establish clear requirements for companies benefiting from the various instruments of state support, linking incentives, financing and public procurement to the defined objectives of industrial policy.
At the center of this reindustrialization effort lies the third axis: Science, Technology and Innovation (STI). STI is the principal factor of productive transformation in contemporary economies. It is the foundation of knowledge-based reindustrialization, business innovation and the consolidation of strategic production chains such as the health economic-industrial complex, the digitalization of industry and the sustainable use of critical minerals, including rare earths and other critical minerals.
It also occupies a central position in the development of technologies indispensable to national sovereignty, such as semiconductors, cybersecurity, artificial intelligence and digital infrastructure. Likewise, it is a decisive element in strengthening the Defense Industrial Base, a sector requiring strategic attention commensurate with its importance to the country and, definitively, a larger budget.
In an international environment marked by intense technological competition, scientific and innovative capacity has become an essential component of national autonomy. This is the field in which some of the principal opportunities are concentrated for flexible international engagement based on more advanced scientific, technological and productive cooperation with countries of the Global South, particularly BRICS+ members, especially China.
During the current Lula government, Science, Technology and Innovation policy reached a new level. The area became part of the structuring pillars of the New Growth Acceleration Program (PAC) and New Industry Brazil, with priority given to artificial intelligence, advanced computing, the health complex, the bioeconomy, satellites, sustainable agriculture, renewable energy and strategic defense projects. The removal of the spending freeze on the National Fund for Scientific and Technological Development (FNDCT) was equally decisive, restoring its capacity to finance research, innovation and the training of human resources.
The policy adopted also sought to bring science closer to the population’s concrete needs. This is expressed in the development of solutions for health, education, food security, inclusion and the digital transition, assistive technologies, responses to climate change, the preservation of cultural collections and the training of human resources for the knowledge economy. Also noteworthy are initiatives aimed at increasing the participation of girls and women in science and reducing regional inequalities in access to the benefits of innovation.
The next development cycle requires consolidating and expanding the National Science, Technology and Innovation System as an instrument for reducing technological dependencies and expanding national capabilities. In line with the National STI Strategy and articulated with a broad program to strengthen education at all levels, the country must pursue the goal of raising investment in Science, Technology and Innovation to the equivalent of 2% of GDP. This is intended to expand resources for research and innovation, strengthen universities and public research institutes, value the training of highly qualified human resources, restore the value of scientific scholarships and create careers capable of attracting and retaining talent.
This also entails ensuring predictability, stability and expansion of the FNDCT’s financial capacity, as well as increasing national investment in research and development through strong incentives for private-sector participation, bringing Brazil closer to the standards observed in the most innovative economies.
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The three axes point toward a new stage of national transformation. Their full realization requires confronting central obstacles in economic and macroeconomic policies, with a view to raising the investment rate. It is unsustainable to maintain it at current levels in a country with such potential and such needs. This also involves fighting for structural reforms of the state, in the political and institutional spheres, making it functional to the objectives pursued, aligning the relationship of the private sector with the goals of sovereign productive modernization and the reduction of social and regional inequality and deconcentrating income. Only some of the most decisive measures are presented here.
A set of measures is aimed at adjusting the monetary policy regime so that the benchmark interest rate can be substantially reduced. While maintaining the Lula government’s firm commitment to fighting inflation, preserving the population’s purchasing power and generating employment, the main measures include widening the range and extending the time frame for meeting inflation targets and excluding the most volatile components of the Broad National Consumer Price Index (IPCA) from the rate targeted by the Central Bank (BC). On the other hand, it is proposed to establish the promotion of full employment as a fundamental objective of the BC, alongside price stability; broaden the range of instruments for dealing with different sources of inflationary pressure; and restore the sovereignty of the popular vote over the conduct of the BC by reintegrating the BC into the structure of the national state and aligning the term of the BC presidency with that of the presidency of the Republic.
In addition to these measures, public commercial banks must act more actively to reduce the final cost of credit, especially for micro, small and medium-sized enterprises, and the Brazilian Development Bank (BNDES) must continue to expand its role as a source of long-term financing at more favorable rates to induce public and private investment in strategic sectors. Under the fiscal regime, the direction is to guarantee and expand the social rights enshrined in the 1988 Constitution—indispensable for overcoming Brazil’s unjust social inequality—and to consistently increase public investment in order to induce economic growth and improve Brazilians’ incomes. One issue is to guarantee the constitutionally mandated minimum spending levels for health and education; another is to legally reinforce the guarantee of an annual real wage adjustment and the use of wages as an index for social security and assistance benefits, as well as for the conditional cash transfer program Bolsa Família.
Another area in which the country also needs to strengthen its sovereignty is exchange-rate policy. A managed exchange rate is necessary to preserve the purchasing power of the national currency, protect the population and avoid volatility harmful to the national economy resulting from financial speculation. In this same area, it is necessary to expand bilateral and regional agreements under which payments are made in reais or in the trading partner’s currency, thereby reducing dependence on a single currency.
The third measure is to establish a specific rule for public investment that ensures increased allocation of resources to areas with high social impact in which public investment is indispensable, such as the health industrial and services complex, urban mobility and the adaptation of cities to climate change. These areas have great potential to induce economic growth based on innovative technologies.
It is also essential to improve the allocation of the public budget, and for this purpose the most important measure is to restore the amounts allocated to parliamentary earmarks to the historical levels that prevailed before the 2016 coup and to revoke the mandatory nature of some of them. Finally, efforts to increase public revenue through progressive taxation proportional to the income and assets of holders of great wealth must continue.
In addition to these, the country calls for other reforms and measures. An urgent task is to increase the budgetary allocation for the Armed Forces to the level required for the defense of national sovereignty, accompanied by a renewal of military strategy. In public security, in order to confront the violence that affects the popular classes above all, the course is to strengthen the National Public Security Policy, based on giving constitutional status to and effectively managing a Unified Public Security System (SUSP), with a review and regulation of the duties and powers of the federative entities and a budget allocation for a dedicated ministry. This includes developing the National Program to Fight Organized Crime, based on cooperation among the various levels of government in a sovereign manner, without foreign intervention. At the constitutional level, it is imperative to amend Article 142 of the Federal Constitution to abolish the Guarantee of Law and Order (GLO) provision, in order to prevent the use of the Armed Forces in public-security matters, as well as to amend Article 144, paragraph 6, of the Constitution to remove the military police and fire brigades from the status of the Army’s “auxiliary and reserve forces.”
In the political system, a reform in defense of proportional representation and the adoption of pre-ordered party candidate lists are indispensable, with progressively increasing parity in the participation of Black people and women. This broadens popular participation in representative bodies and strengthens political parties. Participatory democracy must be strengthened through plebiscites, referendums and popular initiatives, and the meaning of politics as the highest form of social consciousness must be recovered.
With regard to workers, in addition to the historic victory still to be won for a five-day workweek with two days off (5×2), the Consolidation of Labor Laws (CLT) can be updated to encompass other forms of labor (digital platforms, the hiring of workers as legal entities, or “Juridical Persons” [PJs, in a process known as their “pejotização”], intermittent work and app-based work) and to include precarious workers and workers hired as legal entities (PJs) in social security, with proportional contributions and access to benefits.
In conclusion, these are some of the reforms to be debated in society, to be openly and broadly contested, around which forces must be brought together, and on which consultations with civil society, plebiscites and other forms of persuasion and struggle must be organized, as well as pressure brought to bear on the National Congress and the hegemonic rentier sectors. In synthesis, the task is to build a social and political majority to approve and implement them. These are some of the decisive issues for fulfilling the program that triumphed at the polls, in an agreement with the sectors seeking economic progress and strategic national autonomy.
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These contributions from PCdoB originate in its programmatic understanding of the need for a New National Development Project. The historic moment is one in which a new historical cycle of national development must be opened. Our program for a new government must encompass this possibility and build a national and social resolve in this direction. With a new Lula government, this possibility is on the table. Turning it into reality will depend on intense political and ideological struggles that galvanize the united struggle of broad social and political forces. It is a necessity that we must make possible.
National Political Commission of the Communist Party of Brazil (PCdoB)
June 22, 2026
