By LUIZ WERNECK VIANNA*
This year's election has the character of a national salvation movement.
If those who are able to assess the size of popular gatherings are right, there were around 4 million people who were present last Sunday at the so-called gay parade that took place on Avenida Paulista, for some time now the preferred place for popular protests. For everything that was celebrated, sung and said there at the top of our lungs in favor of individual freedoms and religious worship against the grain of the obscurantist values that the Bolsonaro government is committed to spreading, we had a plebiscitary demonstration of repudiation of all that is there.
Signs that a large-scale change is to come were also and still are present in the commotion provoked by the murder of the Amazonian heroes Bruno Pereira and Dom Philipps, which brought to light the world of darkness to which the riverside populations and the indigenous peoples of the regions of the deep Amazon. The attention that public opinion in the countries of the democratic West devoted to this tragic episode, obviously related to the environmental issue, highlights the importance of isolating our country's infamous government internationally and favoring the action of its democratic opposition, especially on the part of the Biden government, of strong significance in our continent.
The beneficent winds that begin to blow in Our America from Mexico to Argentina, passing through Chile, Peru, and now with the good surprise of Colombia, they will not be able to avoid, as the plebiscite of Avenida Paulista signals, that they will blow for our lands. From everywhere, what was predicted to be an irresistible neoliberal tide, movements to contest it are emerging, as in France where the left won a large number of votes in the majority and legislative elections, hinting at even more incisive results in the near future. Another indicator of change of direction is known in the United Kingdom with the first national strike in 30 years in the railway sector. In the same sense, the European Union is noted as a new affirmative presence on the international stage in the name of the civilizing values it represents.
Faced with these new goals framing the immediate field in which our country is located – Ukraine is very far from here – it is important to recognize the distance we find ourselves in since 1964, when a military coup was plotted and carried out with broad external support, particularly of the US government at the time. However, it is an open secret that a movement in favor of yet another coup to victimize the republican institutions is in full swing as a reaction to the electoral victory of the Lula-Alkmin ticket, at this point taken for granted on everyone's radar, confirmed by the institutes of electoral research. Those who plot in favor of the coup have not yet made it clear when they would carry out such an unfortunate plan, whether before, during or after the announcement of the results of the polls.
The pretext for the staging of the coup mocks the preaching of Donald Trump who denounced, since before the elections, that they would be rigged, even without having, at any time, evidence to prove his accusations. In our case, there is an attempt to disturb the electoral counting process with the exotic presence of external corporations, oriented, as the popular saying goes, to spoil the electoral process.
We are, therefore, in a situation of risk that cannot be underestimated. Within the reach of democratic forces, an unarmed power, however, fits an audacious composition of forces that, due to its scale, discourages the coup's grins, forced to retreat by the national and international impacts of their reckless intentions. There is already a robust candidacy, that of Lula-Alkmin, but it is still not enough, since it is necessary to create a movement that becomes irresistible and that drags away any attempts to resist his triumph.
This election has the character of a national salvation movement, as in the powerful anti-fascist fronts articulated by the political genius of notable statesmen in the 1940s, and its singularity, given the weight of our present circumstances, is that its result must be guaranteed before even its realization.
*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).