By LUIZ SERGIO CANÁRIO*
Guilherme Boulos' candidacy was a mistake from the beginning. The PT decided to go down a path that added nothing to the party. The PSOL is also paying for part of its sins
1.
I will not cite numbers here. They have already been cited and counted enough. They have already been used in countless analyses with different approaches. Numbers are essential for a diagnosis based on facts, they give us an accurate measure of performance. From there, we can put together possible scenarios. But numbers are reflections of political decisions.
An electoral defeat or victory, just like a plane crash, experts say, does not have a single cause. The plane can crash due to a mechanical failure, poor piloting or even bad weather conditions. Many times, some of these causes act together.
The mayoral election in the capital of São Paulo cannot be understood based on numbers, for example. But it must be said clearly, and the numbers screamed it, that we were defeated electorally. We managed to reach the second round, but we did not win enough votes in the second round to even threaten the victory of our opponent. It is always good to analyze these numbers in detail to analyze the geography of the vote, various cuts in the electorate and even the weather on the day. All of this is like a kind of autopsy.
But we need to assess, and this is only possible politically, what led to this number. What contributed, what decisions, or lack thereof, led us to this result. This should be the center of the debate. It turns out that, as they say, if victory has many fathers and mothers, defeat is an orphan. Who wants to insist on having participated in the management of a losing campaign? Who wants to be judged for that? Not even the candidate, who is ultimately the most responsible of all, wants to. On the other hand, defeat generates several forensic doctors with no knowledge of anatomy. They do not know where the liver is or what it looks like, but they attest that the patient died of liver cirrhosis.
The story of this defeat begins in 2020. Due to an internal dispute within the majority faction and a miscalculation by almost all of the party leaders, Jair Tatto defeated Alexandre Padilha in the race to be the PT candidate for mayor. All of the other candidates supported Alexandre Padilha, there were six, except Tatto. Among them are Nabil and Suplicy. They lost the race in a process that they thought they had under control and had to swallow one of the much-maligned Tattos. They forgot that they have great influence in important zonal directories. Or in other words, they forgot to make arrangements with the Russians.
The outcome, as we know, was the worst electoral defeat for the PT in history. Jair Tatto received fewer votes than Mamãe Falei. And Guilherme Boulos, running for the PSOL, with the luxurious support of PT sectors and candidates who hid the PT's brands and campaigned in disguise for Boulos, went to the second round. And he lost to the Covas/Nunes ticket. Guilherme Boulos received an unusual number of votes for the PSOL. Many people started to look at him and think: Hmmmm, this is the guy. Let's pull the plug.
2.
We have reached 2022. Lula could be a presidential candidate and Fernando Haddad was considered a candidate for state governor. In turn, the PSOL is talking about launching Guilherme Boulos as a candidate for governor, based on his success in 2020. Lula is leading a negotiation, held behind closed doors, away from party authorities, where an agreement is reached: Guilherme Boulos will not run for governor in exchange for having the support of the PT in the 2024 mayoral election. Guilherme Boulos and the PSOL agree and he runs for federal deputy with a significant number of votes. Many saw this vote as his potential to win the mayoral election.
A little later, the PT held a meeting in the capital where it was decided that the party's candidate for the mayoral elections would be decided in a preliminary election. But there was the so-called 2022 agreement. And support for Guilherme Boulos' candidacy was put on the table as a decision already made and that the agreement, even if made outside the institutions, was to be fulfilled. A symbolic process was carried out to give legitimacy and legality to the support, and Guilherme Boulos was enthroned as the PT's candidate for 2024.
The party's base? Just like in 2020, it didn't have the opportunity to express itself and had to accept, or swallow, a candidacy once again. So, as some already thought in 2020, the "guy" was the PT candidate. And the cherry on the cake comes with the return to the PT with pomp and circumstance, brought by the hands and firm hand of Lula, of Marta Suplicy to be vice president on the ticket headed by Guilherme Boulos. The same one who went around saying that the PT was a party of corrupt people, voted for the coup in 2016, voted for all of Michel Temer's "reforms" and was a secretary at the city hall during Ricardo Nunes' administration.
Not satisfied with putting Guilherme Boulos as a candidate, the group decided to bring Marta Suplicy, of sad memory, to be the vice on the ticket, representing the party. The clue given in 2020 paves the way for the announcement of the death in 2024. The activists and the candidates for council had to campaign for a candidate from another party, the official residence of anti-PTism, the one who says “if there is PT, I'm against it”, who did not participate in the selection process, having at their side a vice-president, who had also not passed the party's scrutiny, of the caliber of Marta Suplicy.
Unlike Santiago Nasar, the book's central character Chronicle of a foretold death Gabriel Garcia Marques, who the entire city knew was on his way to being assassinated by the Vicário brothers, but no one stopped him or warned him. Some voices tried to prevent the outcome and warned him of what was very likely to happen. And the entire scenario, intuited in 2020 and built in 2022, collapsed. Boulos, with Marta and everything, was defeated and with him the PT's strategy for the capital of São Paulo. Santiago Nasar might not have died if someone had warned him of what was about to happen while he was walking through the city towards his death. The outcome was not due to his initiative or action. The same cannot be said about the outcome of the Boulos/Marta candidacy.
3.
What was already looking bad with the formation of the ticket gained strength with the course of the campaign. At first, the Guilherme Boulos peace and love style predominated, with lots of hearts and cute things. An attempt to change the image of the invading, sullen and angry Boulos, for one of a nice and nice guy who doesn't want to hurt anyone. The result was a character much more like the famous Uncle Sukita from an old TV commercial. There was no politics in the campaign. Only an attempt to create a character that sounded fake.
The campaign avoided exploring the legacy of the three PT administrations in the city. Even though one of them was a federal deputy for the PSOL, Luiza Erundina, and another was the vice-president on the ticket, Marta Suplicy. Fernando Haddad was not even mentioned or even briefly appeared in the campaign. Instead, it chose to create something similar to Levy Fidelix's Aerotrem, the Poupa Tempo da Saúde (Health Time Savings Program), which even had an unfortunate name, the same as the Poupa Tempo of the state government. The campaign did not address any of the city's major problems head-on, and how our previous administrations had dealt with them and how they could be dealt with from now on.
Guilherme Boulos seemed like a bolt from the blue, something that appeared out of nowhere and became the beginning of the story. The campaign lacked a face, a brand, and above all a program focused on the needs of the people and clear policies for managing the city. Even the power outage that occurred in the city was simply an attack on the lack of tree pruning by the city government. It didn't work; the population realized that the main culprit was ENEL, the privatized energy concessionaire.
Candidate Pablo Marçal is a separate chapter. He entered the campaign like a hurricane and messed everything up. In the end, he almost made it to the second round, taking out one of the two favorites. He caught everyone's attention and took the focus of Boulos de Nunes' campaign away from him. At one point, it was even considered that Nunes would not make it to the second round. The result in the first round was close, with each of the three candidates receiving around 30% of the votes.
In the second round of the campaign, Guilherme Boulos took a risky step by accepting an invitation, which was declined by Ricardo Nunes, to participate in a live broadcast with Pablo Marçal as the moderator. He went, saw, and lost by legitimizing Marçal as a valid interlocutor. As if he were not a representative of the far-right, who provoked Boulos even with a false document in which he was identified as a user of illicit drugs. And finally, the announced death happens with the PSOL/PT candidacy not advancing at all in the number of votes in the second rounds of 2024, 40,65%, and in 2020, 40,62%, when the PSOL ran alone, with the support of the PT in the second round.
In the sum of all the mistakes, the PT councilors' bench was saved, electing a bench similar to the one elected in 2020, with eight councilors, the largest bench in the chamber. In the same way, the PSOL maintained its six councilors.
Guilherme Boulos' candidacy was a mistake from the start. The PT decided to follow a path that did not add anything to the party. The PSOL is also paying for part of its sins. There are no more Vestal Virgins in the temple of Vesta. Entering the tough game of an election to win leaves virginal virtue aside. The game is tough. Many say that the PT would not have a competitive candidate and that launching someone would be a repeat of the fiasco of 2020. And that neither the PSOL nor the PT would end up making it to the second round.
In fact, those who put together the candidacy were in fact more concerned with the 2022 elections than with what would happen in 2024. This arrangement prevented any candidacy attempt from growing. There are certainly people who could be candidates and the militants would have the combativeness that they did not have, for different reasons, in 2020 and 2024. History does not admit “ifs”. There is a concrete reality that needs to be concretely analyzed. And the concrete reality was the candidacy of Guilherme Boulos. The concrete analysis is that it was a death foretold. Despite the will and the duty to fight the right, wrong decisions lead to bad results.
The PT loses, the left loses and, most importantly, the people of the city lose, who will suffer for four years at the hands of Ricardo Nunes and Tarcísio de Freitas, with the support of Jair Bolsonaro, who nominated the vice president of the winning ticket. It is now up to the PT to rethink with great commitment and seriousness so that we can, with a program focused on the working class and the people, build the chronicle of a victory that was announced because it was built with an eye far beyond the elections.
Building a left-wing, socialist exit must be on the agenda. Despite Jilmar Tatto's statement that the party must move further to the right. Death, despite being announced, does not spare suffering.
*Luis Sergio Canario is a master's student in political economy at UFABC.
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