The Workers’ Party Forgets and Remembers the Past: Tensions and Distensions in the Workers’ Party’s Memories about the João Goulart Government

Abstract

The objective of the paper is to analyze the Workers’ Party relationship with the image of former President João Goulart. Through the examination of interviews and public speeches, I demonstrate that at the emergence of the labor movement called New Unionism, from which the Workers’ Party was born, Goulart’s image was strongly attached to the idea of the populist politician. However, I argue that this memory has recently suffered changes, where Goulart’s image is now seen in a much more positive light by politicians affiliated to the Workers’ Party, culminating in experience of the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff, called by them a Coup, therefore relating the event to the Coup that overturned Goulart. In this sense, I work with the concept of reputational trajectory, showing how the political reputation of the former president changed over the last years.