Opinion – Rodrigo Zeidan: Civilization versus barbarism

This Sunday (2) is the most important day in Brazilian democratic history; nothing more, nothing less. It is the day when society will commit to democracy, taking the worst government in our history out of power.

That this means the PT will be back in power is far from ideal, but it is not a difficult choice. In fact, it’s quite simple: Lula already had a good government, from 2003 to 2006, and even if his second government was terrible, it doesn’t compare to the current disaster.

The institutional destruction of the Bolsonaro government is unbelievable. It seems like yesterday when, at a ministerial meeting, the Minister of the Environment proposed to pass the herd while the media would be worried about the pandemic. And the worst? The government did exactly what he proposed.

Environmental deregulation has already cost society a lot, which is and will continue to suffer commercial retaliation for the neglect of the Amazon, the caatinga and the Pantanal.

The results of the Bolsonaro government: hunger, inflation, unemployment and thousands of graves that would not exist if anyone else were in the chair of the Presidency. A shattered economy and the worst national management of the pandemic among the G20 countries. More than 3,200 out of every million Brazilians have died from Covid-19 and its complications.

Remember Spain and Italy, where the army had to create field hospitals in regions like Bergamo and Madrid? These rates are 2,400 and 2,980 deaths per million residents, respectively. The reason for this is quite simple: Italy and Spain, as well as most countries in the world, took the pandemic seriously.

Presidents recommended that people wear masks, their governments rushed to strike deals with pharmaceutical companies developing vaccines, and health ministers went public to encourage people to avoid crowds. In other words, the opposite of the Brazilian denialist government. The result is there for all to see: Brazil at the top of the ranking of deaths by Covid among the G20 countries.

And the economy? The Focus report is clear. The country is expected to grow 0.5% in 2023, with inflation above target. In any country where the government leaves the economy tidy, expectations are that the following year will be one of low growth and high inflation. Paulo Guedes managed to replace Guido Mantega as the worst minister of the economy in Brazilian history.

I wrote in 2018 that we would go back 50 years in time, with double-digit unemployment, high inflation, without various social rights and without Bolsa Família. Today, there are millions in the queue for this Auxílio Brasil, which is a mockery of what was the best social program in the history of Brazil.

With or without a pandemic, the management of the economy was terrible. The only use of the president’s political capital was used to free up the purchase of weapons by the population, a mistake that will cost many more lives.

This is the government of death; it was four years without hope for a better country. It’s time we threw the far right into the gutter of history, where it should never have come out.

It is sad that I can repeat the same final paragraph of the column before the 2018 election, replacing Fernando Haddad with Lula.

“No matter how bad the PT candidacy is, it is better than barbarism. Vote for Lula, for the love of Brazilians. You don’t have to be wise to know how the film ends with the extreme right in power. Brazil dies in the end.”