By MARCUS IANONI*
What Morena, AMLO and Claudia Scheinbaum have that we can't have too?
1.
I started writing this article last July, but I shelved it. Now, with the (re)emergence of the discussion about the political communication of the Lula government, which is facing increasing pressure from financial market agents against fiscal policy, I decided to return to it.
In mid-2024, José Dirceu published on the website Congress in Focus an article arguing that the Lula government needed to focus on and engage in dialogue with organized civil society. As for the focus, he outlined three axes for a development program (the New Industrial Brazil, the PAC and the Ecological Transformation Plan). In the tax area, he highlighted the need to complete the reform then under consideration in Congress (recently concluded), but also the change in income tax rates and the resumption of taxation of profits and dividends.
In addition to public policies, José Dirceu addressed the politics of alliances, a topic obviously related to the aforementioned dialogue with society. In this sense, he highlighted the resumption of the coalition with the parties that supported Lula in the 2022 elections. In the first round, there were nine: PSOL, Rede, PSB, PCdoB, PV, Agir, Avante, Pros and Solidariedade, in addition to the PT. Through the coalition with the parties, he envisions organizing and mobilizing the following social sectors: workers, businesspeople, intellectuals and the middle classes. I believe that we should include in this list small rural producers, with and without land, the subproletariat, app workers, those excluded from the markets, etc.
2.
From a strategic perspective, an important complement is political communication, a structure of action that operates in the articulation between the focus (program) and the dialogue (alliance, coalition). I would like to highlight here the recent experience of Mexico, which is worth knowing in the effort to build a project to transform Brazil.
President Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO), a leader as charismatic as Lula, made an impactful communication with the Mexican nation, with voters, especially workers and marginalized people, promoting, above all, the unprecedented morning press conferences, the morning, which revolutionized politics in that country. AMLO called his project the Fourth Transformation, in reference to the three enshrined reforms: Independence from the Spanish Empire, the War of Reform, which implied secular and constitutional changes, and the Mexican Revolution, which ended the Porfiriato dictatorship.
His party, Morena, emerged in 2011 as a social movement. In 2012, it became a political party, the year in which AMLO ran for president under this new party and came in second place. But he won the 2018 elections and ensured, in the 2024 elections (there the term is six years), the continuity of the project, with the victory of Claudia Scheinbaum, who, once in office, maintained the practice of morning. She obtained 60% of the votes, against a coalition of the three main opposition parties (PAN, PRI and PRD). Morena has a qualified majority in the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate (in this case, a narrow one). Furthermore, the majority of governors are from the party. This political performance is highly significant.
The Fourth Transformation uses “Mexican Humanism” as its government model, which combines economic, political, social and moral principles. The priority is the poor, although the well-being of all is sought. In other words, the government model is redistributive, aiming to stimulate progress, but equating it with social justice.
As occurred in several experiences of the first Latin American pink wave and is occurring again in the region in the current context of a new shift to the center-left or left (Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Uruguay), the elections of AMLO (now out of office) and Claudia Scheinbaum, sworn in in October, are closely related to the crisis of neoliberal capitalism, a model of accumulation that, here and there, produces and reproduces contradictions and disagreements with equality, democracy, growth and the environment.
Since the late 1990s, but especially since the Great Recession (2007-2009), crises of this financialized capitalism have been occurring continuously, with increasingly damaging consequences for well-being, the regime of popular sovereignty and the environment. In Mexico, neoliberal reforms have led to increased inequality and violence, two serious national problems.
One difference in relation to Lula's Brazil is that AMLO does not hesitate to enter the ideological fray. Of course, Lula also does this fray, but, faced with a political environment in which conservatives have a lot of power in Congress and in which the far right, financial market agents and the mainstream media are firmly rooted in a polarizing economic liberalism, the Brazilian president seems to have a greater propensity for moderation and national reconciliation.
On the other hand, AMLO, leader of Morena, has bet on building the legitimacy of the opposition to the single economic thought. With a certain rhetorical exaggeration, he positions himself as anti-neoliberal and post-neoliberal, even though his government approved, in 2019, the Republican Federal Austerity Law and maintain the autonomy of the Bank of Mexico. During the pandemic, for example, the increase in public spending was one of the lowest in Latin America, around 0.7%.
In any case, austerity is pursued by confronting the oligarchies that benefited from neoliberal reforms, combating their privileges, starting with the tax area. He revoked by decree the tax exemption for debtors, and waged an intense fight against corruption, high salaries, and the excess of public positions. One of the results has been a significant increase in tax revenue from the super-rich.
3.
The difficulties that Lula and Fernando Haddad have in increasing revenue by combating controversial policies, such as many tax exemptions, come to mind, as well as the government's difficulty in effectively changing privileges that, ultimately, as a result of strong business lobbying, continue to be sheltered in the CARF (Administrative Council of Tax Appeals), which judges taxpayers (companies) with billion-dollar debts to the Federal Revenue Service.
In Brazil, the tax evasion meter is not a topic on the public agenda, just the taxometer, just as the expenditure on interest on public debt (the second largest, preceded only by Social Security) is absent from the debate. The focus is only on primary spending on public health and education, BPC, etc. The amount of questionable resources at the service of the private sector undermines the public nature of the national budget.
More recently, we have seen the reaction of the finance sector against Lula's commitment, presented in Fernando Haddad's fiscal package, to exempt citizens who earn up to five minimum wages from income tax and to tax those who earn more than R$50, such as, for example, those who earn income from a jabuticaba that is as sweet for a few as it is tax- and socially unfair for many, namely, tax-exempt dividends, implemented in 1995 by the Fernando Henrique Cardoso government.
AMLO's republican austerity measures aimed to cut spending and tax breaks for the rich in order to boost redistribution to the poor. In this sense, he greatly expanded, and even universalized, a set of direct income transfer policies (for the elderly, the disabled, students, and young people entering the job market), among other measures, such as encouraging microcredit.
He is the heir to nationalism and interventionism. He seeks growth and the fight against inequality through a more active role for the State. AMLO launched major industrial and infrastructure projects, carried out with the active participation of the military, including the 1554 km Maya Train, built in 3 and a half years and inaugurated in 2023, in one of the poorest regions of the country, as well as the Dos Bocas Refinery, run by Pemex (Petróleos Mexicanos), which resumed its investment portfolio after decades of scrapping, and the General Felipe Ángeles International Airport.
Since 2019, the government has instituted an unprecedented policy of increasing the minimum wage, which has already resulted in 110% real increases and lifted almost 6 million people out of poverty. It created the Wellbeing Bank, aimed at serving and banking the most vulnerable social sectors, etc.
4.
There are important differences and similarities when comparing Brazil and Mexico, in that order, the two largest economies in Latin America, countries with profound social and regional inequalities, presidentialism, federations and multi-party systems and, above all, for what concerns us here, both are governed by center-left presidents. This is not about deifying AMLO, a politician who began his career in the PRI, or Claudia Sheinbaum, but about emphasizing that Lopez Obradorismo and Morena have a project, have allies in the popular classes and have a strategy for maintaining and expanding support, highlighting, in addition to government public policies, the political communication structure at the service of the project of national transformation.
On the other hand, the context of 2022, in which Lula was elected, is very different from that of his first election, 20 years earlier, in 2002. The crisis of neoliberal capitalism has deepened and led to far-right responses (including neo-fascist ones) to distributive conflicts between social classes around the world, led by leaders and organizations such as Trump, Bolsonaro, Netanyahu, Meloni, Le Pen, Orbán, Alternative for Germany (AfD) etc.
Another key difference is the ultra-liberal reaction to fiscal policy that followed the stimulus provided by central governments during the 2008 crisis: austerity. Brazil still clings very much to this vision. A third critical point is the difficulty in training left-wing organizations, both within and outside governments, to establish themselves politically as agents of transformation as an alternative to the chaos of neoliberal capitalism. In this regard, the Mexican case seems to be an exception, although it is not a panacea, since MORENA seeks loopholes in the anti-popular economic structure dominated by finance.
To defeat Jair Bolsonaro, a political and social coalition was formed, which was called the Broad Front, in reference to the coalition of the same name attempted against the military dictatorship regime during the Castelo Branco government, bringing together, above all, Labor, PSD and UDN members, and finally, João Goulart, Juscelino Kubitschek and Carlos Lacerda. This alliance was important to win the election.
But it has been costly, especially for the implementation of a macroeconomic policy environment (monetary, fiscal and exchange rate areas) that is pro-development with social justice. It is up to the institutional and social left to combine production, income distribution and sustainability, in short, to create a grammar or a social-developmentalist program. However, this requires building another alliance, a task that is as difficult as it is necessary.
5.
I can't go on for too long. There have been several advances in these two years, as shown by numerous economic and social indicators (low unemployment, growth, resumption of the Minha Casa Minha Vida program and public competitions, etc.). However, the left lost the municipal elections to the right-wing forces, starting with the extremist PL. In the mainstream media, our economic policy proposals are bombarded, etc.
Lula is a charismatic leader and an expert in political communication. One thing that sets him apart from AMLO is that, when necessary, he resorts to a more heated type of dispute, tending towards conflict, which is one of the components of democratic politics. Democracy institutionalizes conflict, as well as enabling the construction of consensus. In the National Congress, for example, we see these two dimensions of politics clearly today.
The major dispute that has been ongoing in Brazil since 2003, with the exception of the 2019-2022 four-year period, is between neoliberalism and social-developmentalism. The former has more structural power, to the point of inhibiting the possibilities of expression of the latter. The Brazilian far right is a fierce political response to the four electoral victories of PT presidents. By all indications, if it were not for Lula's imprisonment, Jair Bolsonaro would not have been elected in 2018. The fact is that the left would need to build a programmatic alternative and a support base distinct from the broad front, in order to expand its capacity to confront the structural power of neoliberalism.
As stated, José Dirceu proposed a coalition that would include, in addition to the parties mentioned above, workers, businesspeople, intellectuals and the middle classes. The transformation of the economic structure is necessary to increase national income and the income of workers, which means that the presence of businesspeople from the productive sectors in the coalition is necessary, since, as is known, Brazil has historically had a liberal-developmentalist tendency, which is not very national-developmentalist and even less social-developmentalist.
In certain contexts, this business community, which is not very nationalistic and suspicious of state intervention in the economy, may accept a very moderate reform program, such as the reduction of basic interest rates, certain industrial policies, subsidized and long-term credit, focused income transfer policies, etc. In this moderate program, which would supposedly be shared with non-financial sectors of the business, the progressive camp would invest in maximizing the possibilities of a productivist and redistributive program that would not be vetoed by its ally.
Given the political limitations of large-scale business, I believe that, in the alliance proposed by José Dirceu, it is important to detail and highlight, with a view to a strategic horizon within capitalism, the importance of the popular sectors, the workers, the sub-proletariat of the cities and the countryside, the precariat in general, entrepreneurs, app workers, micro and small business owners. The possibility of advancing more structural reforms depends on expanding the national and popular character of the coalition.
Compared to the Mexico of MORENA, AMLO and Claudia Scheinbaum, the PT, its allies and the Lula government are at a disadvantage. The companions They have more of what we have less of here: an ethical-political project, the Fourth Transformation, which unfolds into a public policy program; they also have a large popular and electoral base of allies, which is generated, nurtured and expanded by government decisions; and they have a political communication structure, that is, they have a complete strategy. A key component is the technical-political capacity of government actions. Public policies need to be effective and have an impact.
It is worth noting that the PT, PCdoB, PSOL, Rede, PV, etc., and the social movements are essential tools for the strategy. José Dirceu's proposals outline a focus. The key would be not only to define this focus, but to make it clear to the nation, to voters, to support bases. This is where political communication comes in. Jair Bolsonaro, for example, has implemented a political communication structure on social media, in the conversations in the "fenced-in" area published on them, etc.
Where are we and where do we want to go, what are the challenges, the difficulties, the allies, the adversaries, the goals and targets? All of this needs to be made clear to voters on a daily basis. National transformation requires the construction of a social-developmental legitimacy that is an alternative to the financialism that imprisons the country's wings and flight. Gilberto Carvalho has evoked the need for dialogue with the grassroots, with the outskirts, with evangelicals and for more and better popular participation. The change in the correlation of forces in the National Congress and in civil society needs to be built brick by brick. What does Morena have? Can't we have it too? Happy 2025!
*Marcus Ianoni He is a professor at the Department of Political Science at the Universidade Federal Fluminense (UFF). Author, among other books, of State and coalitions in Brazil (2003-2016): social-developmentalism and neoliberalism (Counterpoint).[https://amzn.to/3xXtXe0
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