DAt the same time as it stirs the hopes and creates a favorable scenario to mobilizing the Brazilian people in its struggle for a new way to Brazil, the beginning of the new administration also allows the manifestation of different expectations, even antagonizing ones, among the many sectors of society. It could not be different, since society is manifold and the interests inside it are contradictory.

Unanimities are giving way to the manifestation of different positions on the near and long-term future to be built. And this is not bad. All signs indicate that a new progressist policy of development for the country will derive from the fight between continuance and change.

During the electoral campaign and the period in between administrations, labeled "transition", we have got used to deal with the truism that Brazil needs reforms. Both old and new governments, the media, "market's spokespeople", authorities in international financial organizations, representatives of foreign governments, leaders of political parties, all sang unison the choir of reforms.

But now that the task is to make reforms, to establish an agenda, to define priorities and to evaluate them, defining methods, in sum, to approach the heart of the matter in its complex and arid objectivity, divergences and contradictions arise.

Five reforms were proposed: the tributary, labor, agrarian, political and pension system reforms. Neoliberals and all their political and ideological representatives in the media and in the political system already presented the recipe. According to them the new government may be successful if it takes advantage of the political support it has and of the president's immense popular representation in order to conclude-as soon as possible, during the first two quarters of the year-the "reforms" started by the previous government, which fulfillment was curbed by an outdated opposition, the same one that now is part of the administration. Such recipe, which is equivalent to prescribing poison, comes along with a strong pressure to maintain the same economic policy of the previous administration and to grant independence to the Central Bank. However, this would be the way to continuance, which would be different both in its essence and form to the popular desires and the commitments that granted substance to the support gathered by president Lula.

Brazil will have to tread a different path in order to face the challenge of carrying out the reforms the nation claims, of promoting "changes", as the emotionally aroused president sworn during his inauguration, of carrying out the "social revolution" promised by Chief of Staff José Dirceu as he entered the position during the most lucid political speech of the transition. First, the new administration will have to acknowledge the fact that it receives an accursed legacy and not "a legacy that we would be pleased to preserve and pass on even greater in the future", according to the diagnosis of the new Minister of Finance, Antônio Palocci. Secondly, it will have to promote a debate on the importance of every one of the proposed reforms with the participation of society within the realm of the Council for Economic and Social Reform; but that is not all. It will have to be a debate able to unleash the creative energy of the Brazilian people and support the creation of a true Project of National Development.