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By DANIEL AFONSO DA SILVA*

If there was a “blow”, it was multiple. Articulated in levels and layers. With a single major purpose: “to end the race of these people”

1.

Michel Temer should never have been imposed as a candidate for vice president on the PT ticket of Dilma Rousseff in 2009-2010. Historian Luiz Felipe de Alencastro, a keen observer of Brazilian political reality and an astute connoisseur of the tricks and tricks of his players, signaled, immediately after considering the name of the pmdebista, that the maneuver could fail. Which, sooner or later, the broth could spill over.

The evident party-political inexperience of the “mother of the PAC” gave the vice-president candidate extraordinary excesses of power. A disproportionate set of power and strength that could put the future government configuration at high risk. Michel Temer and his supporters were – and are – “old foxes”, “very old”. Like the devil — Who, as they say, is itchy not because he is the devil, but because he is old.

In addition to being “old people” and like “old people”, Michel Temer and his people are literally carnivores among herbivores. They follow, like predators, thirsty for living flesh and power. The Minister Chief of Staff of the government at the end of her term in 2010 was, in this context, a simple lamb in front of so many big people. Composing with Michel Temer, she negotiated business with a stranger. Playing with fire. Dancing with a potential executioner.

Luiz Felipe de Alencastro's warning was ignored by everyone. The plate, just like that, advanced and became the winner. President Lula da Silva and his deputy, José de Alencar, transferred the country's top responsibility to a dissenting couple. Coming from arranged marriage. In full nuptial disarrangement.

Right after the inauguration – wedding moment –, the estrangement between president and vice-president was latent. On that January 2011, XNUMX, the pmdebist was publicly recognized as a “foreign body”. It was clear to everyone that the PT and some PT supporters wanted to be the leaders and there would be no concessions for members.

Lulopetista euphoria fueled this dystopia. President Lula da Silva passed the sash to his successor with a popular approval rating of over 80%. President Dilma Rousseff, as she could not fail to be, felt she was part of this success. But the situation was more complex.

The petista arrogance was immense. A doxa da self-righteousness lulopetista imposed himself authoritatively everywhere. It was impossible to oppose. Roots PT supporters felt like they owned the ball. They believed they had won alone – without José Genoíno or José Dirceu – the success of the party's third presidential election. Michel Temer – and Dilma Rousseff herself – were seen as an appendix to the award. As if they had been mobilized just to “comply with the table”. "Poster Boys". The PT, they claimed, would win with anyone. Lula da Silva “would even elect a pole”.

The post in question was Dilma and Temer, Temer and Dilma. The regulars at Bar da Rosa, Zelão's restaurant and Gela Goela's garage in São Bernardo do Campo never concealed this understanding. Temer and Dilma, Dilma and Temer were, therefore, in bad shape. They were both “foreign bodies” in the party scheme. But Dilma Rousseff had an alibi: she was the elected president. She had been demiurgically anointed. Michel Temer, in tragedy, was just a second-degree aggregate.

All this, from the outset, said many things. Especially that division came from everywhere. Broken versus government. Government and its interior.

In this regard, Dilma and Temer, Temer and Dilma were also strangers among them. They nurtured different dreams and feelings of mutual suspicion. But Dilma Rousseff was the president. Michel Temer, the deputy. There was a hierarchy of function among them. But, beyond the formalities, Michel Temer, deputy, suffered double or triple everything in silence. He was abused on all sides.

If all this were not enough to foresee a disaster of colossal size, the mentor and guarantor of conciliation, Lula da Silva, left the scene to be treated for cancer in 2011. In his absence, the party rats, from the press, the judiciary and infiltrators in the government itself took over. A true war of bosses was established. Government, party, the government and the party became a field of tension.

It is not difficult to remember the “vigorous” “cleaning” that President Dilma Rousseff promoted in her ministry even before the end of the first year of her term. Nelson Jobim, Minister of Defense, claiming that Ideli Salvatti and Gleisi Hoffmann were unaware of Brasília was the last straw for the president to “empower” herself and place “each one in their own square”.

Minister Guido Mantega owes us a book, even a posthumous one, of sincere memoirs about this period of unequivocal and widespread humiliation. Minister Carlos Lupi, in danger of being ejected from the government, had to declare himself publicly with an “I love you, president”. All the diplomats, starting with the very discreet Chancellor Antonio Patriota, were thrown into the spotlight. The discredit and suspicion of the president reached unimaginable levels. Michel Temer, in all this, was just another target of Mrs. President.

No vice president of the Republic, since vice presidents and presidents run on a common ticket, has been as hostile as Michel Temer. None of them was, right out the door, framed as “decorative”, “decoration”, “fool”, “fool”, “plant” and all sorts of names of injury and impotence that a fertile imagination can find. Not even Governor Itamar Franco, President Fernando Collor's unwanted deputy, experienced such bitterness and intense disappointment.

The good journalistic chronicle still owes us a good book on the “hell of Jaburu”. Between José Sarney and Hamilton Mourão, only Marco Maciel, vice president of President Fernando Henrique Cardoso, perhaps had the means to fully embody his role. From start to finish, in two terms, he was neither silenced nor thrown into disrepute. President Fernando Henrique Cardoso says almost nothing about Marco Maciel in his four volumes of Presidency Diaries. Which, of course, denotes something positive. His memories are especially dedicated to those agents who, in the government or the government, caused confusion.

Enthusiasts of the marriage between Lula da Silva and José de Alencar must calm down. When the monthly allowance scandal broke, it is worth remembering that José de Alencar was on the verge of abandoning the PT vessel and President Lula da Silva. Including creating and joining another party. Remember is living.

But Michel Temer was hors concours. With him, the tension was too much. As vice president, he witnessed the entirety of the sullen reversal of expectations about Brazil. A reversal that animates an ambient disappointment that afflicts us to this day.

Michel Temer watched in silence the machination of “tropical capitalism” proposed by President Dilma Rousseff. He probed in silence the emergence of the “New Economic Matrix”. He bitterly disliked the election of the “national champions”. He noticed from the beginning that this was reckless. Little truly grounded in reality. He knew that damming up prices, in that way and with that intensity, was “poking jaguars with short sticks”, as the sociologist André Singer would later theorize.

Michel Temer saw all this from the inside since Jaburu. And nothing said or could say. When he tried to say, he was not heard. He received a simple one: plants don't talk. They just adorn. When the nights of June 2013 keep all those responsible in office awake at night, the entire presidency of Dilma Rousseff was thrown into the corner. Those initial “20 cents” landed like a right hook on the government's eyebrow. Who immediately became one-eyed and began to see, even more, just what he wanted to see.

Michel Temer was, however, even more marginalized. The president assumed the global risk of managing that crisis alone and alone. She has done a lot. Recognize yourself. She calmed the mob. But it was little. The Cup came and the “there will be no Cup”. Then came that infamous curse at the State Mamé Garrincha in Brasilia. The “FIFA standard” guerrillas came for everything – from hospitals to public services. It didn't take long for Petrobras vigilantes to appear. It's not even worth remembering that outrageous and unbelievably vulgar sticker they made to fix the fuel pump when filling up their vehicles.

There, 2013-2014, everything was already lost. Lula da Silva wanted to return. Gotta go back. He was hailed to return. But he didn't allow himself and he wasn't allowed to. Dilma Rousseff “followed” with Temer, without trembling or fearing.

“Don't mess with a winning team”, they would have said. But were the Dilma Rousseff government and the PT winning?

Anyway, Dilma and Michel, Michel and Dilma won the elections again. Aécio Neves, from Minas Gerais, did not contain his emotions. He contested the result. He adjudicated the lawsuit. He tainted the elections. He was morally and politically criminal. He incited hatred and fomented polarization. He crushed what was left of a presidency.

Joaquim Levy, in place of Guido Mantega, softened the fall. But the claim was already contracted. The issue was not “just” the “economy, stupid”. The issue was governance. And, perhaps, this entropy of governability started in the match. There at the beginning. Not in 2013 or 2015. But in 2009. When he allowed himself to compose a list with someone he didn't know, he didn't like or want to.

 

2.

“I will not resign. I repeat: I will not resign”. With this statement, President Michel Temer reacted to the crisis that erupted in his government in mid-May 2017, when the indiscreet conversation he had had, in private, with businessman Joesley Batista was revealed. What entered the political, police and judicial chronicle as the “joesley day” was an accurate dart in the heart of a presidency that was trying to legitimize itself and establish itself in the cracks opened by the impeachment by President Dilma Rousseff in August 2016.

Even in the face of such a hard and rude blow, the now president did not fall. But he also didn't act anymore. He went on absorbed, stillborn, limping and agonizing and dragging himself to the end. Until handing over the presidential sash to his successor Jair Messias Bolsonaro.

Between the audio revelation, on May 16-17, and the president's statement, the next day, hundreds of requests for impeachment were filed, imagined or rehearsed. All relevant sectors of society were apprehensive. The person of the president was weakened. His public figure, scorched. His presidency compromised. The viability of the government turned uncertain.

Multiple options came into play. Waiver, dissolution, impeachment, fall. Only suicide that, perhaps, not. Regardless of the option adopted, it was known that the overthrow of two presidents in less than twelve months would bring irreparable damage to the country. Anomie would once again take over.

The well-thought-out and dramatized keynote of the emphatic “I will not resign” still echoes in the ears of those who saw and heard that performance live or in those stormy days. But, more than that, with the due retreat, one realizes that that moment and that reaction were decisive to contain this failure not only of the Michel Temer government, but of the country as a whole that was on the verge of becoming a true banana republic.

President Temer managed that moment and that crisis well. But the price was high. Too high, perhaps. Henceforth, he who was considered a “coup artist” by the lulopetista wing and the like, began to have his discredit increased. From the press and the people in general. The “Out, Temer” became the daytime chant. Something almost deafening.

Whether Michel Temer did good or bad in maintaining his government remains for History to assess. On the political level, he added half-lives to the already suffering Brazilian democracy.

Looking closely, your “I won't resign. I repeat: I will not resign” was one of the most important and complex manifestations of recent Brazilian political history. By acting in that way, he dialogued more with the fall of President Fernando Collor than with that of his predecessor, Dilma Rousseff. O "joesley day” was very close to becoming President Temer's Fiat Elba.

A Fiat Elba might even have its charm – rather for a ride; today, for collectors – but, it must be recognized, it is very little to overthrow a President of the Republic.

The downfall of President Dilma Rousseff was plotted from afar. Deep down inside her, she knows it. All of her most sincere allies know this.

No one embarks – or should embark – on a presidential adventure with strangers. Dilma Rousseff entered the dispute with Michel Temer. It is not admitted – or should not be admitted – that the war between party leaders affects the stability of the government. Dilma Rousseff imported into her government all the internal crises of the PT and the other allied parties – remember, for example, the emblematic case of Eduardo Campos. It does not isolate itself – or should isolate itself – a powerful ally, “old fox” of politics, vice president of the Republic, with impunity. Dilma Rousseff made Michel Temer a “decorative deputy” from the very beginning.

The perfect storm that involved protests in June 2013, protests against hosting the World Cup, protests against re-election, protests against price repression, protests against the quality of spending, the fall in the international price of commodities, protests against the personality of the president, etc., were layers of a tragedy – the tragedy of impeachment – in various motions.

O impeachment 2016 was not the product of one or another single, isolated factor. There was a macabre synergy to incinerate a President of the Republic elected and re-elected by the Brazilian people.

Um impeachment it's always traumatic. He almost never justifies himself as truly necessary. One impeachment it is a political convention between politicians. “Coup” or not is always difficult to assess. There are no consensuses. Experts struggle over a definition. Politicians, too. Everyone advances arguments and almost no one arrives at the complete reason. Everyone loses, we lose. Lose the country, society, the economy.

O impeachment 2016 was the product of a multidimensional entropy of governance. Perhaps only Getúlio Vargas had experienced something similar. Multiple factors. Multiple problems. Multiple opponents. Many simultaneous vineyard mills to war with.

An almost forgotten aspect of the political chronicle today is the fact that Dilma Rousseff represents the third term of the same political group in supreme power. Remembering this aspect is not throwing water in the mill of the insane critics who denounced – and still denounce – the PT of being a “political project of perpetuation in power”. Those who bragged – and brag – that, in this way, were the defeated cynics and non-conformists of elections.

Far from it and far from them, to reflect on the PT's usury in power is to meditate on the importance of the transition of parties in the Presidency of the Republic as a sustaining factor for the democratic system. The hypotheses of coalition presidentialism put forward by the sympathetic Sérgio Abranches could be a start. Much has already been evaluated about Brazilian democracy based on its model. But, perhaps, they lack the History to assert themselves as a system, who knows, more calibrated.

It should be noted that in France, President François Mitterrand, the only French president to serve two full terms of seven years each as originally envisaged in the Constitution of the Fifth Republic promulgated by General Charles De Gaulle, never truly wanted to make a socialist successor. Lionel Jospin, First Secretary of the Socialist Party and his natural presidential successor, never received his “blessing”.

In the Brazilian case, something similar happened with José Serra. José Serra, presidential candidate of the PSDB in 2002, also did not receive the full seal of approval from President Fernando Henrique Cardoso – in 2010 it was another election and another scenario.

Mitterrand and Cardoso, profound connoisseurs of history, politics and life, certainly intuited in their inner reflections that heredity in power only had meaning in monarchies. Democratic regimes demand airings arising from the change of political associations in power.

When Nicolas Sarkozy became president of France in 2007, it was the first time that the same party was confirmed in supreme power after three successive elections. Sarkozy succeeded Jacques Chirac there – who had defeated Lionel Jospin in 1995 and Jean-Marie Le Pen in 2002. The intermittency of the Gaullist party of Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy in power generated – of course everything is much more complex than that – a real shattering of the French party system. As a result, the totality of traditional French party-political tendencies fell apart.

Socialists split into many trends ranging from Jean-Luc Mélenchon and his group France Insoumise to Emmanuel Macron and his party Working. Marine Le Pen transformed the Front National, historic historic party of the historic French “extreme right”, in the Rassemblement National. An “a-historical”, “anti-historical” party and almost nothing truly national. Éric Zemmour, an ultraconservative-Gaullist with authoritarian leanings, created the reconquest to overcome the void that the party of Sarkozy and Chirac as well as that of Jean-Marie Le Pen – the Front National original – left. Thus, reconquest it is a party buried in historical references and full of pasts. But, so far, there is no certainty that it will have a promising future to tell.

In the case of Brazil, where everything is even more complex due to the deleterious effects of Operation Lava Jato and the hypertrophy of the judiciary over the other powers, the collapse of the party system is also notable. And a lot of this is possibly due to the fact that the PT was in power for so long, from 2003 to 2016.

This is not a wildly offensive promotion of the PT. This is not about anti-petism. The question is whether to recognize that something of the unwritten pact of gentlemen for redemocratization may have been broken with the election of Dilma Rousseff in 2010. Nothing, perhaps, similar to the imposition of Júlio Prestes in 1930, which would generate the fury of Getúlio Vargas and the Revolution of 1930. But something very close to the usury of power that the prolonged permanence of a party in the maximum function causes or can cause.

The experts on duty still owe us a good and dispassionate assessment of the meaning of Dilma Rousseff's interrupted presidency. Likewise, we are also owed a good interpretation of Michel Temer's place in all of this.

Considered decorative from the beginning, never considered or remembered, always hostile, what could Michel Temer do in the face of the free fall of the presidency from 2013?

The experience with José Sarney and Itamar Franco teaches that the deputy plots his plans in secret. President José Sarney received an intestate inheritance upon the death of President Tancredo de Almeida Neves. He rose to a position and a function that he, José Sarney, in fact, perhaps, did not want. At least, at that time and in that way.

With Governor Itamar Franco it was a little different. President Fernando Collor was charred daily by the fury of congressmen and the press. He lived his “thousand days of solitude” as the journalist Cláudio Humberto coined it. But the Minas Gerais discretion of vice-president Itamar Franco was exemplary. Little is said about possible voluntary and overt offensives by Itamar Franco, like his disgraced counterpart, President Fernando Collor.

In the case of Michel Temer, this discretion did not exist. That letter of self-praise, whining and distrust addressed to President Dilma, dated December 7, 2015, but made public the day before, carried profound meanings of monumental institutional and party splits. Looking at it closely, it was the vice president's last goodbye and Michel Temer's last goodbye to the vice presidency. He knew that henceforth his destiny was to take the place of his counterpart.

How could it be different? Hard to say. What would the “decorative deputy” have to do but decorate the shipwreck scene? What can be said is that that letter changed the level and meaning of the political crisis. Yours, “I will not resign. I repeat: I will not resign”, a year and a little later, too.

 

3.

Michel Temer handed over the presidential sash to his successor as if he were getting rid of a burden that was too heavy for him. No Brazilian public figure, at the head of functions as important as the vice-presidency and presidency of the Republic, has been the object of such hostility, offense and discredit.

Initially, it was treated as a “decorative vice”. After impeachment of 2016, “coup artist”. From his rise to the presidency, he began to be applauded with the “out, Temer”. When from "joesley day”, in May 2017, they called him an “upstart”. During carnivals and afterwards, “Count Dracula”, “bloodsucker”, “undead” and the like.

When he delivered the sash to the new president in January 2019, his project was to be Marcela's husband again. He wanted to forget about public life and disappear. He longed to practice, once and for all, the “out, Temer” in his own way and on his behalf. He sought to be forgotten. But it wasn't easy.

Due to the excesses of Operation Lava Jato, he became yet another president of the Republic arrested. Intercepted in the middle of the street, in daylight, he was extensively photographed by paparazzi and popular, mocked and harassed around the world. All for the pleasure of the butchers on duty. The same ones who said they were “cleaning up” the nation.

His imprisonment was brief. But the stain remained. In addition to being a “coup artist”, a prisoner. Important portions of the hatred against him surfaced at the beginning of his journey with Dilma Rousseff. No one in the PT, aside from President Lula da Silva and very few other supporters, had confidence in him. He was an intruder and thus deserving of the highest suspicion.

When the collapse of Dilma Rousseff's presidency became irreversible, her rise to maximum power was imminent. As the parliamentary maneuvers progressed, the horse that would take him to the Planalto Palace began to be saddled. Mount and follow were the only chances he would have to reach the nation's supreme office.

Despite being sequentially elected and re-elected as a federal deputy, his electoral capillarity has always been limited. His expressive shares of votes covered only his native Tietê and a few simple outskirts of the state of São Paulo.

Michel Temer came to the Presidency of the Republic at the hands of impeachment. But impeachment it was financed by economic agents opposed to the “tropical capitalism” of the deposed president. Those who were not anointed “national champions”. Outposts from the “New Economic Matrix”. This meant that the new president, Michel Temer, owed a debt to these agents. Read, the people close to Fiesp.

Once president, therefore, Michel Temer had the task of rendering accounts to his guarantors. The price of that bill was the implementation, as urgently as possible, of the “Bridge to the Future” platform. “Bridge to the Future” was the businessmen's plan to “recover” and “moralize” the Brazilian economy.

Maintaining the governance of the new presidency was directly proportional to Michel Temer's ability to implement the “Bridge to the future”. In this endeavor, “Ponte” engineers – Mansueto Almeida at the head – worked day and night, under sun and rain, until they erected the dreadful Roof of Gastos.

After the “Joesley day”, on May 16-18, 2017, Michel Temer held on to his position, but completely lost his reason for existing in it. His presidency was derailed. He stayed there just waiting for his end. That came.

During the four years of Jair Messias Bolsonaro's presidency, he, Michel Temer, fulfilled his determination to disappear. He made discreet, sparse, and rare appearances.

After the success of President Lula da Silva in the October 2022 election, as if by magic, the Federal Audit Court and the National Congress approved the accounts for the last two years of Dilma Rousseff's presidency. The same accounts whose disapproval had forged the “fiscal pedaling” thesis.

The retrospective approval of these bills reopened the discussion on the impeachment de 2016. And with that came the logical question: who will repair President Dilma Rousseff, the PT and the country for such humiliation, attrition and intemperance?

Those who followed the inauguration ceremony of Lula da Silva's third presidency, on January 1, 2023, could notice the eloquent absence of almost all former presidents of the Republic of Brazil. With the exception of presidents José Sarney and Dilma Rousseff, Fernando Collor de Mello, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Michel Temer and Jair Messias Bolsonaro did not attend the enthronement event.

Fernando Collor's motivations were, proportionally, the same as those of Jair Messias Bolsonaro. Both were and are bolsonaristas and antipetistas. Fernando Henrique Cardoso, after the injury to his femur, is retired – and nobody knows exactly what state of mind and health he is in. Michel Temer was the only one absent for reasons of embarrassment.

As predicted and boasted, the inauguration ceremony of President Lula da Silva would reserve moments of rehabilitation for President Dilma Rousseff. Lula da Silva's inauguration party would also be the moment to reinstate Dilma Rousseff. Michel Temer, foreseeing the obvious, preferred to give up going to Brasilia.

But, on the 24th and 25th of January last, on a trip abroad, through Argentina and Uruguay, President Lula da Silva replaced President Michel Temer as one of those responsible for the downfall of Dilma Rousseff. He called him a “coup artist”.

Since then, a profusion of impressions has emerged. Many of them militant – on both sides – and incredibly passionate. Nothing exempt. It is not a case of resuming them. The important thing is to note that, six, seven years after the fall of President Dilma Rousseff, perhaps it is time to promote a rereading of the facts with less emotion, passions and partisanship; and, who knows, greater rationality.

It doesn't take much analysis to realize that the deadly dart that hit President Dilma Rousseff was always aimed at President Lula da Silva. O impeachment 2016 was, as they say, “little coffee”. O deep state, Brazilian and foreign, whose strong hand and friendly arm was Operation Lava Jato, wanted to decapitate the main leader of the PT and the PT itself. He wanted to eliminate Lula da Silva and, later, the PT. He wanted to “finish off the race of these people”, as an ignorant and unrestrained senator of the Republic summed up.

Therefore, it is not understood impeachment 2016 without taking into account the arrest of President Lula da Silva in 2018. The arrest of 2018 retroactively justified the impeachment de 2016. In this sense, the “coup” and the “coup leaders” that President Lula da Silva mentioned again on his trip to Argentina and Uruguay are connected in the same plot of the sabotage of 2016 and the ignominy of 2018.

Analyzing it calmly, Michel Temer is almost nobody in all this gear. The whole of the Brazilian political environment became a Kingdom of Denmark. It smells bad, really bad. There is rotten flesh on living bodies walking around.

You run away from this discussion like the devil from the cross. But, after the nights of June 2013, it became evident and latent that Brazilian redemocratization was misaligned with its purpose. Pacts of solidarity for democracy, forged under the military regime, began to collapse. Only this break in the spring for redemocratization would justify the arrest of presidents of the Republic.

The 580 days in prison, the Lula Livre vigil and the apprehension of the whole world over the possibility that Brazil is becoming an unequivocal banana republic were the biggest “tightening of the rope” that the country has suffered in all of its recent history. No one truly serious can imagine, for even an instant, that the country has emerged unscathed from all this. There has been – since then and before, since 2013 – an institutional, political, legal and moral hysteresis in Brazil.

It is wanted, many want, forcibly, to erase and forget this true crime of damage-to-the-country that was the arrest of President Lula da Silva. You want to reduce it. You want to put it second, third, fourth. When, in fact, that was the trophy for the executioners of democracy.

O impeachment 2016 was, yes, serious. It deserves to be discussed, evaluated and, if necessary, repaired. But he was only part of the larger plot that involved ending Lula da Silva and the PT.

No country similar to Brazil arrests (or arrested) the President of the Republic. In the United States or in France and even in England, many supreme chiefs of the executive would deserve to contemplate the icy underworld of prisons. The Watergate dossier, the Monica Lewinsky moment, fictitious French jobs or even the motivations that led Prime Minister David Cameron to suggest the referendum protocols for Brexit were serious enough to – considering a metric such as that of Operation Lava Jato agents or any faulty metric – send noble North American or European gentlemen to jail. But over there, no one dared to go that far. They have already killed or tried to kill their representatives. Truly arrest supreme chiefs, never.

To imprison a president is to discredit the integrity of a nation that has been guided by him for some time. Imprisoning President Lula da Silva – as was done and for the length of time they kept him in prison – was the greatest irresponsibility that could be carried out against Brazil. It was the most serious event of the entire redemocratization period. It was an ignominy.

Counterfactually, without the arrest of Lula da Silva in 2018, captain Jair Messias Bolsonaro would probably be asphyxiated in the nest. It wouldn't move forward. Even with Adélio's intervention. With or without stabbing. He would be shot down in mid-flight. Bolsonarism would ebb. The canine vulgarization of politics would never gain a foothold. The creeping polarization that lobotomizes entire segments of Brazilian society would fade away. The imbeciles, individual and collective, would walk off the stage. They would lose the spotlight. They would revert to their structurally homely irrelevance. And the Brazil of today would be another. In other conditions. If not economically better, then certainly mentally, emotionally and spiritually superior.

Unfortunately, it wasn't like that.

The period 2019-2022 existed. It's no use denying or deceiving yourself. It makes no sense to tell stories. The result from the polls in October 2022 will continue to be contested. The country remains divided. Today, in the second month of the new government, the Brazilian population, according to the calculations of strategist Marcos Coimbra, follows 45% for Bolsonaro, 45% for Lula da Silva and 10% indifferent. This is an irremediable fact. How to harmonize?

This true “hurricane cart” is not simply due to the impeachment of 2016 – which was, as always said, a scoundrel thing. But it is due to the whole of the plot that involves the impeachment 2016 and the criminal arrest of the President of the Republic in 2018.

If there was a “blow”, it was multiple. Articulated in levels and layers. With a single major purpose: "to end the race of these people" from the arrest of their main leader.

Put even more directly, in many ways, the 2018 arrest was the last breath of the redemocratization initiated by “Manda Brasa” in 1974. The unjustified and unjustifiable imprisonment of a President of the Republic for 580 days in a Mamertina-type dungeon broke the last notes of the unwritten agreement between gentlemen for the maintenance of democracy and against authoritarian temptation.

When President Lula da Silva, therefore, recently mobilized the expression “coup leader” to frame President Michel Temer, he was sending a message not simply to President Dilma Rousseff's decorative vice president. He was reminding everyone involved in the disastrous plot of the implosion of democracy that, sooner or later, some bill will be collected. The truth lawless land that turned the country will unquestionably be revised. A new redemocratization, with more dignified and more responsible gentlemen, will be inaugurated.

Only in this way – as President Lula da Silva knows well and has already issued many warnings – will the past finally be able to pass away.

*daniel afonso da silva Professor of History at the Federal University of Grande Dourados. author of Far beyond Blue Eyes and other writings on contemporary international relations (APGIQ).

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