By LUIZ WERNECK VIANNA*

With the 2022 presidential succession, the time has come for society to reckon with the misdeeds that have been inflicted upon them.

There is little left for us to get rid of the miserable situation to which we have been exposed in three long years and seven months, although there is no way to predict whether we are going to say goodbye to it in the midst of serious disturbances or without them. The return to the AI-5 regime, project in pettore of those who still hold the reins of power, it is no longer a plausible hypothesis and society has amply demonstrated its rejection of fascism and faces its destiny through the democratic way of the electoral process. It is in this inhospitable terrain for Bolsonarism, anchored in the Centrão, that he plays his last card with the outpouring of money among the poorest that now begins with the aim of capturing their votes, an initiative with unpredictable results.

Such an initiative, formulated in a hurry for short-term electoral effects, does not fail to reveal, regardless of the intentions of its actors, that it is also betting on the path of the ballot boxes, despite the fuss promoted daily about them being unreliable. In any case, in an analysis text like this one, assuming by hypothesis that this murky orientation leads the succession to a favorable outcome, we would not have a new edition of the Bolsonaro government, but an unprecedented Centrão government, a burlesque cogitation that populates the imagination of their mentors.

This hypothesis, however, is far from being reliable, as evident in the uprising of democratic awareness in the defense that spread among the intelligence and considerable sectors of the economic elites of the values ​​and institutions that conform the democratic State of law, in the vigorous manifestos read in August 11 at the Faculty of Law of the University of São Paulo, that of FIESP jurists and businessmen, to which dozens of others, from various states of the federation, were added, replicating the entire content of the text made public on that symbolic day of August subscribed by a million people and numerous entities, including the most representative of capital and work and social movements.

In this case, the fact that this demonstration chose to establish a line of clear convergence with the 1977 demonstrations in opposition to the dictatorial regime of the time is of particular relevance, both in the text and in the place where both were made public. In this sense, much more than a topical protest against the misdeeds of the current government and its autocratic nature, the powerful manifestation of today addresses the intention of carrying out the unfinished democratization of Brazilian society.

This is an auspicious opportunity that cannot be missed, like the one that we failed to escape due to political negligence by allowing the separation between the themes of the social question and those of political democracy. The PT's attempt to drive from above, based on State actions in order to meet the social agenda, led to the disregard of institutional limits, and, even more serious, to harmful practices in the composition of its political articulations that, in many cases , disrespected unavoidable principles of republican ethics.

This unfortunate type of intervention, in an attempt to accelerate the advancement of social issues, especially in the Dilma Rousseff government, favored the eruption of a broad movement of denouncements that took the form of the so-called Lava Jato operation, whose actions eroded the foundations of support for the coalition. led by the PT, paving the way for knights of fortune in the presidential succession, easily won by Jair Bolsonaro.

The new government was born under the revanchist inspiration of the authoritarian phalanx defeated by the broad democratic coalition of the 1980s, having as its target the civilizing achievements accumulated in the FHC and Lula governments, particularly in the fields of social and environmental issues, in a predatory version of capitalism victorian who in politics admits, sometimes covertly, sometimes openly, his adherence to fascism, malevolent intervention hitherto rejected by our democratic institutions.

Now, with the presidential succession of 2022, the time has come for society to reckon with the misdeeds that were inflicted on them, restoring it to its natural tracks in pursuit of civilizing ideals. It won't be an easy task, your opponents intend to oppose with all the resources they can. The deeds of the last August 11 should serve as a ruler and compass in your next steps. They give us the password – move forward united in broad alliances – so that we return to the bed of our best traditions, democracy always as they called out loud and clear.

*Luiz Werneck Vianna is a professor at the Department of Social Sciences at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio). Author, among other books, of The Passive Revolution: Iberism and Americanism in Brazil (Revan).

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