Former president Lula’s articulations towards a return to power continue with full force, as they say in nautical jargon.
What is not known is whether such navigation will take him to safe harbor or whether he will be engulfed by storms on the way.
What is certain is that, even if it arrives at the desired destination, the disembarkation of the crew on dry land presents challenges that cannot be neglected.
The PT, until now, has never been a party of broad fronts, because it was constituted as a “de facto” front to overcome the old Brazilian communism, represented by the PCB.
On this path, which began in 1979, trade unionists, liberation theologians, dissident communists and ecologists gathered around a radical discourse for the overthrow of the military dictatorship, which was overcome by voting in a negotiated transition, led by the MDB, which the PT described as “bourgeois”.
Governments without programmatic commitments
Since then, the PT bet on “the worse the better” until the 2002 election campaign, when a change of discourse allowed it to win the presidency without making programmatic commitments to serious allies in Parliament.
Preferring to navigate the nooks and crannies of ill-constituted interests in Brazilian politics, the Lula government ended up in the monthly allowance and the petrolão.
The alliance with the PMDB and the PP was not only unable to divert the PT from the route of buying the right-wing benches to remedy its legislative minority, but also gave it the strength to deepen this practice.
For what reasons, then, should we bet on the current conversion of Lulopetism to the broad front?
One answer comes from the sociologist Luiz Werneck Vianna, a prominent name in the left-wing democratic intelligentsia.
For him, “a new opportunity” opens up “in the face of the exceptionality in which the country lives”, referring to the economic-social disaster of the pandemic and the way in which the Bolsonaro government tried to take advantage of the situation to impose a regime discretionary.
In this context, for Werneck Vianna, the Lula-Alckmin alliance would be “the Brazilianized formula of the Portuguese contraption”, uniting “the experiences of social democracy among us”.
In this way, a political front would be formed capable of confronting the extreme right, now allied with the center – a bloc “in the social and political control of the mass of the laggards of Brazilian modernization”, which is projected from the “emerging interests in agribusiness and the elites in charge of finance” (two modern sectors, by the way).
The problem with this proposal is that such privileges were not only not openly faced by the PSDB in its eight years in power, but were strengthened in the 13 years of PT governments.
Operation Lava Jato attested to this by bringing such practices to the fore in cases sanctioned by the Brazilian judicial system, although repeatedly denied by PT leaders. Its annulment corresponds to a series of legal casuisms, far from true constitutional guarantees.
It cannot be ruled out, of course, that the hardships that our Tupiniquim social democracy went through, including the 2013 revolt, have not taught their leaders something.
However, the circumstances and the method of building this supposed broad front around Lula, which Werneck Vianna believes is capable of “redeeming the best promises that we have cultivated along our trajectory”, are not promising at all.
First, because it was marked by Lula’s immediate electoral interest in liquidating the election in the first round, which would relieve him of greater programmatic commitments in the second round.
Secondly, by revolving around the ex-president’s charismatic leadership, who would rise to be the supreme arbiter of the “gadget” in the making.
Another answer, in the same direction, comes from the (few) signatories of the manifesto “Movimento Pelo Brasil”, articulated by a dissent from the Sustainability Network.
Characterizing the upcoming election as a “plebiscite”, this group asserts that “there is no doubt that history is making Lula represent the alternative that Brazil must embrace”, due to the “agreements of his two governments and the willingness to build a broad programmatic.
This perception is based not only on forgetting the mistakes made in the two governments of Lula and in the government and a half of Dilma -whose paternity is undeniable-, but also in a “naïf” trust in a mere disposition, without effective basis in institutional practices of agreements and dialogues.
The only programmatic articulation promoted by the PT was taking place around the formation of a federation with the PSB, PCdoB and PV, strongly marked by the mere mathematics of the number of prefectures governed by each party.
This shows the failure of the left to take flight over the swamp that the Brazilian party-parliamentary system has become.
The necessary but unlikely disruptions
But not everyone is lulled into this siren song.
A major media outlet recently argued in its editorial that “the demagogic irresponsibility” prevailing in the country for 20 years, “with the exception of the (…) government of Michel Temer”, meant the “setback and destruction of the future” that culminated in Bolsonarism and in repackaged lulopetism.
The latter’s promise of “reconstruction and transformation of Brazil” does not hold up in the face of his persistence in denying the need for reforms postponed throughout the period in which he was in power.
While we may differ from the mainstream media on the nature of the reforms that the country needs, we agree that “Lula is not willing to do the hard work of promoting structural legislative changes that are politically difficult and that require contradicting the interests of organized sectors.”
To the despair of those who continue to bet on the democratic rupture with the neo-patrimonial-financial order, which extorts the present and steals the future of Brazil, it is more likely that Lula and the PT will continue to be inclined to restore the (unsustainable) balance of the New Republic, whose corpse resists going down to the grave.
