By LUCIANA GENRO*

We walk with Lula against Bolsonaro, betting on the development of student struggles, the working class, the feminist and anti-racist struggle

The mobilization of this August 11th is a milestone in the fight against the Bolsonarist coup d'état. The former captain, who was expelled from the Armed Forces, wants to be re-elected to continue his attempt to transform Brazil into a dictatorship. Defender of torture, misogynistic, racist and LGBTphobic, Jair Bolsonaro is the worst that the Brazilian political regime has produced. The naturalness with which he defends torture and the closure of Congress and the STF to concentrate powers in his own person is the result of multiple factors that we cannot fail to mention at this time when we join different political sectors and social classes against the coup d'état .

Brazil is one of the most backward countries in Latin America in the application of Transitional Justice – that is, measures of reparation, truth and justice in relation to the crimes of the military dictatorship. In 2011, overthrowing an ADPF proposed by the OAB, the STF endorsed, with the active support of the Attorney General of the Republic, the understanding that the amnesty law does not allow the criminal prosecution of public agents who persecuted, tortured and killed opponents of the regime during the dictatorship that began with the 1964 coup. This was one of the episodes that shed light on the transition negotiated from above that enabled the end of the dictatorship without the emergence of a real democracy.

The extreme right resurfaces with force through the figure of Jair Bolsonaro because this rationed democracy that was conquered in 1984 did not deliver what it promised. The 1988 Constitution, which today we have to defend against the outbursts of the right wing, is only truly complied with in the articles in which it guarantees private property (not for everyone) and economic freedom for the exploitation of work (for those who get one).

The institutions of this commanded regime and at the service of economic power are a democratic achievement in the face of the darkness of dictatorship, but in no way are they an expression of a real democracy. And it is in the absence of this that sectors of the people ended up seeing in the denial of institutionality expressed by Jair Bolsonaro a hope for better days, without corruption, without an elitist justice that decides in its own cause (as we saw in the decision of the STF to increase the salaries of its ministers at a time when hunger strikes millions again), without a Parliament that protects vested interests through secret amendments and laws that guarantee the interests of those above and punish those below.

This finding obliges us, at the same time that we join the plural efforts to prevent the reactionary and coup advance, to fight for the creation of an independent political body that presents, fights and mobilizes for a proposal of institutionality radically different from the one we are obliged to defend to prevent kickback. It is not in defense of the status quo that we will encounter the legitimate indignation of large portions of the people who do not feel represented by this rationed democracy, in which the richest 1% earn almost 40 times more than the poorest 50% or in that the 10 richest clans in Brazil concentrate assets of R$ 400 billion reais.

It is in this dialectic that we find ourselves at this moment in which we will face an election polarized by Jair Bolsonaro and Lula, in which the latter is the instrument chosen by the majority of the people to defeat the obscurantism of the extreme right. We walk with Lula against Bolsonaro, betting on the development of student struggles, the working class, the feminist and anti-racist struggle to defeat the coup d'état and develop an alternative power at the service of the majority of the people.

* Luciana Genro is a state deputy for PSol-RS. Master in Law from USP.

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