Two worlds

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By TADEU VALADARES*

Considerations on the Brazilian electoral scenario and the unfolding of world geopolitics

Speculum. It is increasingly clear whether or not we go to the second round will depend on the final score of the Evangelical vote and also on the useful vote of the less passionate ciristas, once the first electoral round is concluded. If Lula does not achieve a decisive victory on the 2nd of October, almost all of the postmodern hopefuls, having thoroughly examined the viscera of electoral polls, continue up until now to imply that victory will be ours.

But, if there is a need for a second round – something that will come our way, I am almost certain… – another decisive point will be the margin of victory when we reach the other bank of the electoral river, on October 30th. If small, if it turns out to be that way, the neo-Pentecostal vote will probably be the factor with the greatest weight in shortening our victory. Its immediate outcome will arrive with Newtonian mechanical precision: the November-December transition as the apex of the storm that has accompanied us since 2018, permanently inflated by the occupant of the Planalto.

Even so, it is difficult for the extreme right whose mainspring is Bolsonarism to opt for the coup in any of its many forms. But if the coup is unlikely to come, the climate that awaits us in November and December will be dotted with threats of all kinds, and by a significant increase in violence both in rhetorical and real terms, degenerations in themselves signals of what could happen later with the fragile democracy that we try to protect so that it protects us.

Even worse: if the margin of our victory in the second round is small, Lula will begin his third presidential term in a fragile position, while Bolsonarism will immediately become the main opposition force both in Congress and within civil society. It's easy to imagine all the risks arising from winning almost on top of the draw line. Let us remember Aécio Neves and Dilma Rousseff. Let's remember Pirro. In this worrying scenario that may mark the beginning of the new cycle, the ghost of a future coup will start to accompany us, the phantasmagoria always threatening to transmute into complete horror, something much worse than what happened in 1964, 1968 and 2016, not to mention 2018. Thankfully, we will have Lula on the Planalto. Less good, much less, but still ultimately acceptable, in the name of the potentially catastrophic situation that convinced those who should be convinced: we will also have Geraldo Alckmin there, the reborn.

In all of this, don't forget either: the broad front that is beyond power, the one that is slowly leading us back to power – just the executive… –, most likely, I am almost certain, will not be able to sustain itself over the next few years. four years. What brings everyone together lives from the celebration of the moment when history, cunningly, seems to ignore the differences and oppositions that mark the social body. Differences and oppositions that, in an antagonistic society, despite everything continue to exist as long as the society is antagonistic.

What brings us all together, having achieved its immediate objective, to avoid irreparable disaster, the victory of Bolsonaro and his fanatics, will tend to fall apart. How long? I venture to ask why this taking a risk is part of the speculation: the contraption that is already saving us, saving all of us and all of them, has enough cement and steel in its foundations, which will allow it to resist all weather conditions until the four-year period is completed. ? It seems to me not. If it comes into force by the end of 2024, it will already be very good.

This is perhaps the essence of our difficult equation, if we focus only on the world called Brazil. But if we also turn to the international scene, to the external-internal that equally challenges and determines us, the obvious, ululating or not, is that the crisis of the international order will continue to be marked by the specific bipolarity of the transition of the axis of political power and global economic development from the so-called West to the pole that has been rising since at least last February, the Eurasian pole.

Titans clash ahead. On the one hand, the Western or 'meta-western' bloc that spreads from the USA and Canada to South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, Australia and New Zealand, passing through the United Kingdom, the European Union, NATO, Israel and much more. At the other pole, much less structured still, the two great partners of the unlimited alliance, China and Russia. Besides them, several other countries, many of them still timidly consulting their haruspices. An obvious highlight for India, a kind of true balance. And many expectations regarding the “expanding BRICS”.

In the immediate future, and on this immediate future the shape of the future will largely depend, no one knows how and when the second European war, post-dissolution of the USSR, which today pits Kiev against Moscow, NATO and the EU against the Russian Confederation, will begin to end. the US being the ultimate determinant of the 'Western' position, while China quietly serves as a counterweight. The previous war, which led to the dissolution of Yugoslavia in 1991 and the creation of Kosovo and Serbia as Yugoslavia's successor, continues to be the focus of tensions that every so often threaten to erupt into another military conflict.

Something similar could happen if Moscow does not lose the war, but the result will be the opposite. The war in Ukraine, much more risky than the one in Yugoslavia. This is because it can metamorphose into a true European war, at the limit the game being played with the possibility of using tactical nuclear weapons, a door that, once opened, can generate not mere deterrence, but the annihilation theorized by the doctrine of Mutual assured destruction.

Linked to this military scenario that is bordering on the unthinkable, we see the sharpening of the economic war of attrition, carried out by the West in a broad sense against Russia, which is increasingly less discreetly supported by China. The net result of this rise to the limit that no one knows what it is: the galloping worsening of the economic crisis that, which started in 2007/2008, did not abandon us, a long crisis, aggravated by Covid-19, a crisis that could reach twenty years, a crisis which may favor, at the military level, actions that may lead us to the Third Great War, probably the last one. Will there be any contenders left?

These two worlds – the Brazilian one and the world’s increasingly heated geopolitics and geoeconomy – form, in their contradictory totality and in the complex and somber interactions of their many elements, the dark sea in which, duly captained by Lula, we will navigate through four years. Knowing, all of us, that many are the monsters that hide and manifest both in the internal plane and in the world. Knowing, all of us, that the course of the world will remain mortally undefined for decades more.

Recalling the surprising expression used by Lula at the São Gonçalo meeting, we need a lot of “God's hand”, that is, if we are monotheists or if we are willing to think about politics, politics, the conjuncture and immediate history with language of popular religiosity is always somewhat naive. But, precisely because ingenuity will not lead us anywhere other than what is announced disaster, I prefer, I confess, to trust Lula's hands much more.

Even for a simple reason: we don't have a helmsman who can compare to him. Ciro, Ciro, Ciro, some say. But Cyrus, in this register too, sways like the axis of the world when touched by the hand of God. Except that, in the case of Ciro, it is he who oscillates, touched by his own spiritual hands or by somewhat strange brain waves, between the pathetic and the ridiculous.

As in the swaying banner in the deserted square where only the wind runs, the concluding scene of the final hour from Stanley Kramer: "There is still time, brothers."

* Tadeu Valadares is a retired ambassador.

 

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