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shifts in its approach to Brazil’s international relations. This evolution is the focusof the following section.6.3. PT’s foreign policy evolution and its critics: institutional freedom andlegitimating power‘Rupture is Necessary’? PT and the limits to change in Brazilian ForeignPolicyIn January 2003, Lula and the Workers’ Party entered government in a two-foldstraitjacket, imposed by IMF austerity on one hand, and its own domestic deals withcentrist parties in order to be able to pass legislation in Congress, on the other. Asan internal party matter, foreign policy had come a long way from the party’s cleardistaste for ‘imperialism’ in its founding document from 1980, and its later promisesto place a moratorium on foreign debt payments if it came to power. While foreignpolicy was not one of the party’s key platforms in its four presidential campaigns(three of them unsuccessful), it was one of the fronts on which PT had to fend offattacks on its presidential ambitions, especially in the 2002 campaign. These attacks,admittedly, were sparked in response to calls by the far left in PT for Brazil toterminate its arrangements with the IMF and renounce the repayment of Brazil’sforeign debt 509 .The domestic context, especially Brazil’s political system, militates against rapid andfar-reaching policy changes in any public sphere. This is in part a vestige of thetransition to democracy, which allowed much of the old elite to retain positions ofpower and prestige in national, state and local government. 510 Furthermore, nationaland state politics sometimes appear to operate on different axes, especially givenwide income and education-level disparities in Brazil. Institutional freedom in termsof formulating and implementing foreign policy is thus limited for any governingparty, owing to the Congressional system, and the primacy of Itamaraty in foreignpolicy implementation. The state, with PT in government, also laboured under alegitimacy deficit in foreign policy, as notable sections of the foreign policy509 Statements to this effect were contained in the document “A Ruptura Necessária” (ANecessary Break), discussed at PT’s XII National Convention in December 2001. SeeGraieb, 2002.510 Francisco Panizza, “Is Brazil becoming a “boring” country?”, Bulletin of LatinAmerican Research, 19 (2000): 503.208