Brazilian Labour Party (1981)

The Brazilian Labour Party (Portuguese: Partido Trabalhista Brasileiro, PTB) was a political party in Brazil registered in 1981. It was the seventh largest political party in Brazil with more than a million affiliated as of 2022.

The party was founded by Ivete Vargas, niece of President Getúlio Vargas, and claimed the legacy of the historical PTB founded by Getúlio, although many historians reject this because while early version of PTB was a center-left party with wide support in the working class, and despite the name suggesting a left-leaning unionist labour party, the later PTB was mainly a big tentcentrist party for most of its history, considered part of the Centrão, a bloc of parties without consistent ideological orientation which supports different sides of the political spectrum in order to gain political privileges, while Leonel Brizola's Democratic Labour Party (PDT) came to be regarded as the true heir to the original PTB's labourist and leftist traditions. As such, they supported the presidency of Fernando Collor de Mello, Itamar Franco, and Fernando Henrique Cardoso — all considered center-right — as well as Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and the first term of Dilma Rousseff — who were left-leaning presidents. Since the conservative wave in the 2010s, the party had shown strong support for the government of Jair Bolsonaro, presenting policies from a more right-wing angle, in addition to affiliating federal deputy Daniel Silveira, known for making references to AI-5.

After the 2022 Brazilian general elections, PTB failed to break through the electoral threshold, thus cutting access to party subsidies and free political advertisement. Thus, in November 2023, it merged with the party Patriota to form the Democratic Renewal Party.