By TARSUS GENUS*

The grim victory of lies and fear

On the Saturday that preceded the election Sunday, a false survey by Datafolha announced the victory of the candidate who had been cornered and devastated, the night before, by a serene Manuela and sure of her convictions, after the biggest typhoon of lies, slander, improprieties and moral attacks , never evicted – certainly by organized bases of criminals, inside and outside the country – against any candidate for Mayor of Porto Alegre, throughout its history.

This election in Porto Alegre depletes the legitimacy of democratic elections in the city and opens – if Melo associates himself with a Bolsonarist destiny that seems to be in progress – an endless cycle of perversions, towards a rupture without return, between the political forces of the city.

In elections, "dirt" -voluntary or non-, often from both sides, but these, when they are issued on an industrial scale as a plan of "cleansing" and moral slaughter of opponents, turned enemies, are only possible when the clandestine technique becomes – on a global scale – fascist thought organized by the extreme right, which has already chosen to become directly a criminal community. This is the concrete logic of the Concentration Camps that Soviet and American troops showed the world at the end of World War II. War: engineering, technology, and modern chemistry -recalling a story by Onetti- make “hell so feared that it always returns to the present when the night of crises gives birth to its monsters, before dawn.

On the day of the elections, strident trucks drove through the city's neighborhoods and reported that the victory of Manuela and Rosseto would be the specter of communism circling Porto Alegre and more, they tried to make their candidate's argumentative poverty and mental confusion forgotten in the night's debate. above, with surprising information. From the amplifiers of the trucks came out, with sparks of built up hatred, that the fate of the city would be – Manuela victorious – to eat “dog meat” and see the city’s temples “closed”. After necropolitics was naturalized with the praise of death and the symbols of the “weapon”, people accept all of this – in an electoral process – with the pasteurized naturalness of that majority of the media that supported the coup, which helped to overthrow Dilma, forging the “fake -crime” budget.

At the end of this cycle of liberal democracy, the “cock bottle” and the mandatory “dog meat” do not generate convictions, but remove the doubt of those who have already been captured by insanity: in each episode of disputes over the future must be located in the “other”, in the different, in the marginal, in the poor, in the political adversary, the factors of my unhappiness and the anguish of living in an unfair world. With this idea in mind, the sum of small nights of crystals and small Marches on Rome, they build -by fear- those that must be slaughtered in any case. Social tension becomes the broth of lies and lies become the elixir that suffocates reasonable doubt.

The electoral results demonstrated that the strategy worked, as the blank and null votes – added to the abstentions – were higher than the vote of any of the candidates, in isolation, that is: the “non-election” – due to indifference – was higher than the election based on choice . In the city that welcomes the results without joy and without utopia, we are stunned by the fainting energy that the city was beginning to rehearse, with the victory of Manuela and Rosseto. This would put Porto Alegre back in the world of democratic solidarity, as a counterpoint to the crisis, which it starts to generate - not only the return to hunger and misery - but also to the gloomy elections out of nowhere

In this gloomy and dystopian victory, cars passed through some parts of the city declaring the defeat of “communism”, but they did not salute the victory of nothing, precisely because it was “nothing” that won the election. And this one doesn't promote parties or joy. It does not concern the victorious candidate, as a human being, but the non-project he represented to win the election: preventing citizens from eating dog meat and allowing temples - which would never be closed - to remain open forever.

Sadness descended, it seems, over most of the city and the dark victory of fear began to take its toll, as the pandemic, moral misery and manipulation only promote numerical victories and short-lived ones in the spirit. Tomorrow will be another day and we, the utopians of equality, those who never reached out to fascism or negotiated with racists and militiamen, will carry on. And revive.

This is the synthesis of an illegitimate victory that began its foundations there in the denial of politics, with the glamorization of the June movements, to demonize the left and that now bets on the “centrão”, to bring Bolsonaro to sanity. The phenomenon later occurred within the “theory of the two extremes”, to elect Bolsonaro against Haddad and now opens spaces for the “sugarness” of the old MDB, to be replaced by the violence and insecurity that spreads in the city of dialogue and tolerance .

Let's wait for the usual media to start demanding the installation of a next Talent Bank, to sow “technical” staff in the City Hall, to replace the ineptitude of politicians. Could it be a better team than the ones who came up with the dog meat strategy? Well…this is actually a who-won-the-election problem!

*Tarsus-in-law he was Governor of the State of Rio Grande do Sul, Mayor of Porto Alegre, Minister of Justice, Minister of Education and Minister of Institutional Relations in Brazil.