By LUIZ WERNECK VIANNA*

The majority demonstration through the vote of sectors condemned to exclusion

Three more quick days and we left behind a government that conspired relentlessly against our country, against what was best in its institutions and traditions, investing furiously in the destruction of the civilizing work that we were committed to building, applying in its eradication. Barring an intervention by the supernatural de Almeida do Nelson Rodrigues, the natural course of events points to the electoral victory of the Lula-Alkmin candidacy, probably in the first round, with which we will resume, after a painful hiatus, control of the reins of our destiny.

We arrived at this auspicious result without having resorted to exasperated forms of struggle, not even, as in the 1980s, mass demonstrations of protests, but through a movement of public opinion that gradually took shape as it found support in the actions of our most high courts, especially in the STF and in sectors of the press, which ensured the validity of the Constitution, and, fundamentally, the defense of the electoral calendar, a favorable terrain for manifestations of the democratic will.

Once the electoral competition opened, the size of the dispute between the government and the population, as measured by institutes specialized in electoral disputes, soon became known, when news of the unique nature of this election was revealed, revealing that the vote denounced being determined by two fundamental questions, that of perverse distribution of income in the country and that of women, object of the secular patriarchy that keeps them in submission. Regional inequalities also came to the fore, eloquent indications that in these elections, much more than a simple change of government, issues relevant to the deepening of Brazilian democracy are coming to light.

The government that was there, despite the medievalism that guided it, clearly dissonant from a society that is modernizing materially and in its values, had, and still has, the support of large sectors of the dominant elites, most of them aware that their good harvest has come to an end, and it is time to look for new directions for what they are ready with the sense of opportunity that never lacked.

In this sense, some of its most conspicuous ideologues are plotting to avoid a victory for Lula-Alkmin in the first round, forcing her into negotiations that alleviate the costs of the announced defeat and that stop the vigorous democratic impulse that comes from the polls. . The few days that separate us from the vote must be dedicated to a redoubled effort in expanding alliances and calling voters not to abstain from voting. Massive turnout should seal the fate of this ill-fated government, opening up opportunities for us to carry out the democratization of the country that we left halfway through.

Having no illusions, the task facing the future government of the victorious democratic coalition that we were able to build challenges us to the limits of our strength. It is not just a question of a mere presidential succession, but of recovering the threads that escaped our hands due to our negligence and that connected us to what was best in our history, since the hidden meaning of the defeat that we imposed was to remove the roots that still bind us to our formation as a society created on the basis of slaveholding landholdings.

Sergio Buarque de Holanda, in the work of genius Brazil roots, published on the eve of the Estado Novo, rightly wrote that democracy was, among us, a huge misunderstanding insofar as it had been a rhetorical concept in the practice of oligarchic elites. Decades later, along a path made in zigzags, at times embarking on disguised solutions of political liberalism, at times openly by authoritarian regimes, we now arrive, through the majority demonstration through the vote of sectors condemned to exclusion, such as subordinate sectors and women, that democracy, after all, can be well understood. Path, moreover, advocated by this great author.

*Luiz Werneck Vianna is a professor at the Department of Social Sciences at PUC-Rio. Author, among other books, of The Passive Revolution: Iberism and Americanism in Brazil (Revan).

The site the earth is round exists thanks to our readers and supporters. Help us keep this idea going.
Click here and find how