The past week has been frustrating for those who thought that, for the first time, the weather would play a central role in the election.
The candidacy for the Senate of one of the most illustrious defenders of the environment in the Republic, Alessandro Molon (PSB-RJ), is compromised by partisan trivialities. Ciro Gomes (PDT), who has been wandering far from democratic lands for a long time, called the indigenous issue a “politics of chit-chat”.
It is very difficult to criticize Simone Tebet (MDB) after the machismo festival at the convention that formalized the nomination of her vice-president, Senator Mara Gabrilli (PSDB-SP). But, as a presidential candidate, she will have to explain the contradiction between her promise to stop deforestation and her group’s historic involvement in land predation in Mato Grosso do Sul.
To explain the bad relationship between climate and election, some point to political complacency. Candidates and candidates have no incentive to invest in conquering an electorate that is already guaranteed. After all, after the country’s first ecogenocidal government, everything will be considered progress.
The second, more cynical, suggests a problem of electoral demand. According to this thesis, Brazilians, beset by immediate material problems, would not have time to worry about the environmental agenda.
Tell that to the newly sworn in Gustavo Petro. Colombia’s first leftist president never hid his environmental agenda during his campaign. Even at times when he was reaching out to business, his promise to accelerate the transition from oil to renewable energy was kept.
The same goes for Gabriel Boric in Chile, who despite leading a country even more dependent on the exploitation of its natural resources than Brazil, put the green economy at the heart of the government’s program. Both showed that radical climate policy is compatible with the search for alliances at the center.
Outside Latin America, the social democrat SPD only returned to power in Germany thanks to the Greens. The left-wing Nupes coalition, led by Insubmissive France, also owes everything to environmentalists, and nothing to decadent socialists. Joe Biden’s last chance to save his government was snatched away by activists who threw themselves on the floor of Congress to force Democratic senators to reopen negotiations on a climate investment package.
This paradigm shift has as much to do with values ​​as pragmatism. The challenge of global warming gives new legitimacy to state governance and dramatically broadens the horizon of public action. It allows the creation of new industrial, scientific and social initiatives that were considered unfeasible until a few years ago.
Even the liberal Emmanuel Macron equipped himself with a quasi-Soviet “Ministry of Ecological Planning” to take full advantage of this new opportunity. In all democracies threatened by the far right, climate policy has played a key role in the re-founding of the state.
It is up to the voter to prevent Brazil from becoming an unfortunate exception.
