By ARACY PS BALBANI*
Politics has increasingly become a case for psychology and the police
On the eve of the second round of municipal elections in many locations, the controversy over the behavior of the electorate continues. Intellectuals and journalists are analyzing the causes of the growth of the right and the extreme right in city halls and municipal chambers. Political analysts are projecting the consequences of the election results in the most populous municipalities in 2024 for the 2026 presidential race.
Digital influencers give their opinions on the huge phenomenon of blank and invalid votes and abstentions in yet another election in the country, where voting is still mandatory, but in theory it is optional.
Organized activists and other citizens wonder how blatantly incompetent rulers or politicians involved in serious corruption cases still manage to be the voters' favorites, especially the poorest voters who are harmed by inefficient public management.
Louise Michel, a French educator imprisoned in the 1880s as an anarchist activist, told her friend Paul Lafargue when he visited her in Saint-Lazare prison: “Don’t complain, I am freer than many who walk around in the open air; they are prisoners of thought; they are chained to their property, to their interests in money, to their sad necessities of life, they are taken to the point of not living, not being human, thinking beings.”1
Several concrete facts allow us to apply Louise Michel's phrase to Brazil today. Starting with the exponential increase in political violence; not only with insults and forged dossiers against opponents, but also with shootings targeting candidates in broad daylight, and chair-throwing live on TV.
Voters are coerced into silence and voting for candidates linked to militias and other criminal organizations. Politicians have to ask permission from drug and arms trafficking leaders to hold campaign events in areas dominated by crime. Not even indigenous villages escape the oppressive drone surveillance of structured crime.
Fear is unmistakable on the faces of the poor, whose shacks in the outskirts and slums are adorned with flashy political propaganda posters of millionaire candidates who have always lived in gated communities with private security. Politics has increasingly become a matter for psychology and the police.
Even the temporary “job” of flag-waving campaign worker is becoming extinct. Windbanners mass-produced replace human labor to shake retouched photos and Slogans of candidates on street corners and in squares.
The record number of complaints of electoral harassment in companies shows that the slave-owning colonialist discourse and practice are more alive than ever in Brazil. There is no shortage of poor servants who play the role of foremen for their bosses against their coworkers, who are just as exploited and despised as they are.
Among the middle class, consulting the public system for reporting campaign accounts to the Electoral Court would be amusing if it weren't worrying. City council candidates from a party that opposes the mayor make donations to the candidate... of the government. How come?
In the upper middle and upper social classes, being able to circulate in the open air, even in armored luxury cars, does not guarantee freedom of choice when casting a secret vote. Those who depend on operating licenses and permits, municipal tax incentives or the provision of goods or services to the government know that there are hundreds of prying eyes and ears of political colonels on the lookout, ready to wag their tongues and trigger reprisals that affect private financial profits. The colonel's political bet may be the neighbor of the entrepreneur-voter in the condominium.
Ultimately, the activists who are politically aware resist, while in many municipalities, the depoliticized masses, prisoners of themselves or chained to unspeakable interests, tend to perpetuate in power those who steal, but do not always do anything worthwhile.
It seems that everything is really a question of the tail: whether it is tied or whether it is the one wagging the dog.
*Aracy PS Balbani é otorhinolaryngologist. Works as a specialist exclusively in the SUS in the interior of São Paulo.
Note
1. Louise Michel. I belong to the Social Revolution. Samantha Lodi, Ed. Entremares, 2022, p. 128.
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