This week, three men will compete in the PSDB candidacy for the presidency. They can barely score above 3% in national polls.
The campaign could hardly have been more melancholy. João Doria, Eduardo Leite and Arthur Virgílio went through the debates facing each other over the bylaws, the voting application and other minor intrigues. They will arrive on voting day without even having drawn a draft country project.
This is the latest act in the decline of a party that, seven years ago, reached 49% of the vote in the second round of presidential elections and was preparing to start a new cycle in power.
It is all too easy to blame the PSDB’s ruin on externalities such as the crisis of traditional parties and the rise of the far right. Their leadership stratagems also contributed to the disaster. By decreeing the end of politics and betting on a television auditorium animator, FHC demoralized an entire generation of prepared cadres. The reconversion of Aécio Neves into the center’s caretaker destroyed the party’s prestige among its traditional electorate, mobilized for years by the anti-corruption agenda.
Unaware of the value of political loyalty, Doria traded the souls of toucans for his election for governor in 2018. Cursed by that Faustian pact, he spent his term trying to contain the pocketnarization of radicals and the exodus of moderates. Today, its messages crafted by marketers echo in the void.
Only those who decided to move away from farce or fight against drift, in the image of Geraldo Alckmin and Tasso Jereissati, retained their political authority. Eduardo Leite’s modernizing promise may have come too late to reverse the disbanded climate.
If Doria had looked at other liberal democracies, she would have understood that the unconditional abolition of the sanitary cord that divided the right and the far right would be fatal for the PSDB.
After years of observing the changes in the political system, European leaders arrived at a clear and consensual diagnosis: the far right has its own cycle and tends to lose strength after failed government experiences, as in the case of Italy, or long cycles of infertile contestation. It is up to traditional parties to preserve their identity, avoid the opportunistic temptations of electoral cycles and let the storm pass.
The loser from the PSDB’s blunders is the Brazilian voter. As has become clearer since last week, the conservative pole is reorganizing itself around two forces that have in common the contempt for republican norms: Jair Bolsonaro and Sérgio Moro.
Kidnapped by the outgrowths of the anti-political rebellion, which bequeathed us sanitary vandalism, coup brutality and global shame, the Brazilian right is doomed to the fate of the American right, swallowed up by trumpist fanaticism. All Democrats only have to deplore the end of the tucana era.
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