By CHICO ALENCAR*

Five reasons to stay in the party that make me better as a public figure.

“Being born is not enough. We are born to be reborn” (Pablo Neruda).

There are moments in life when values ​​and beliefs need to be reaffirmed. Not dogmas, but convictions and utopias – various and changeable, but essential.

I like belonging to the Socialism and Liberty Party, like our 240.631 members throughout Brazil, including the 56 who came since last October. We are a party under construction and growth, with a vocation for greatness. Contrary to what some may feel, PSOL does not 'limit' me: it makes me better as a public figure.

There would be 500 or 50 reasons to stay in the PSOL, but I can sum it up in five:

(1) PSOL is a party that seeks to be faithful to its own name: Socialism and Freedom. It seeks to maintain the dimension without which any political organization that is not of order loses its raison d'être: the dream of an egalitarian society, of endless democracy. PSOL is committed to social transformation and public ethics;

(2) PSOL's principles and program are constantly updated. It does not want to control social movements, but to encourage them. It does not believe itself to be the sole bearer of urgent changes, but it is their agent, along with other forces – without diluting itself or losing its identity;

(3) The PSOL is not a purely electoral party – like almost all of them: it is part of everyday life, of daily active citizenship. Our life force comes from militants, grassroots groups, sectors of society's diversity: youth, black people, women, LGBTI+, ecosocialists, education, health...

(4) The PSOL contests elections presenting collective projects, placing the programmatic above the “pragmatic”. Understands the need for alliances and coalitions based on a common platform, to be built around a table of unity – in the struggles against neo-fascism, from now on; in the 2022 dispute, to be built without hegemonism and with proposals for another Brazil, in a progressive and broad perspective, without sectarianism and without illusions with the right;

(5) The PSOL demands, healthily, from each parliamentarian a performance as a caucus, fights individualism (great seduction of the bourgeois institutionality, rooted in the national culture), has a critical and healthy attention in relation to our words and votes, as much as it does not waver in the defense of their representatives, when they are the target of attacks by the powerful whom we fight.

I still believe that “a violin, no matter how tuned it is, does not replace an orchestra”.

2020 municipal campaign, which made PSOL the party with the largest group in the Rio Chamber (which it will continue to be!) and the one that grew the most proportionally in local legislatures.

* Chico Alencar He is a professor, writer and councilor at the City Council of Rio de Janeiro.