By LUIS FELIPE MIGUEL*
It's good to remember who is the captain from Rio de Janeiro who governs the people of São Paulo
Tarcísio de Freitas supported consumer tax reform and Jair Bolsonaro was angry. Excellent. But that was enough for him to be presented as the messiah of a new “moderate right”.
It's good to remember who the Carioca captain is who governs the Paulistas.
Tarcísio de Freitas is doing the movement that every political sponsor does when he reaches a political position greater than that of his godfather: trying to gain some light of his own.
And it doesn't want to risk a direct conflict with the federal government. It's hard enough to govern a state you don't know, imagine on a collision course with the Union.
But being smart doesn't make you a Democrat. Not by far. Tarcísio de Freitas is a Bolsonarist of the first hour, who was an accomplice in all of his boss's excesses. It shows no ethical brakes.
The murder of Felipe Silva de Lima is yet to be elucidated. He was executed in Paraisópolis, when Tarcísio de Freitas was campaigning there. After the candidate falsely announced that he was the victim of an “attack”, the Bolsonarist campaign had to explain itself – an audio showed that they demanded that a cameraman delete the images of the shooting.
The farce of the “attack” should already have been enough to have contested Tarcísio de Freitas's candidacy, if there was electoral justice, or to guarantee his defeat, if the São Paulo electorate had a shred of morality. The real hypothesis that his security guards killed people makes it even worse.
In government, Tarcísio de Freitas is not much different from a clone of Jair Bolsonaro – and I'm not just talking about the epidermis. There is olavete in Culture. He has a “civic-military” school defense. He has an end of vaccine requirement. He has the transfer of public lands for land grabbing. He has a frantic privatist project, which wants to reach the state water company, against the grain of the world consensus: water cannot be privatized.
But it doesn't matter, business is doing business. And Tarcísio de Freitas even goes down to a tailor-made performance to please the average bolsominion.
Do you have opportunism? He has. Tarcísio de Freitas chooses to adapt, he wants to slide between the Bolsonarism that elected him and the toucan atavism of São Paulo.
This does not mean that he has taken any steps towards becoming a Democrat. It is an illusion to judge that every fascist is a person of intransigent “principles”. He can also be an opportunist. Most are, I would venture to say. But fascism is there, as a personal predilection, ready to be put into practice when circumstances allow. And, as we sadly know, they often do.
* Luis Felipe Miguel He is a professor at the Institute of Political Science at UnB. Author, among other books, of Democracy in the capitalist periphery: impasses in Brazil (authentic).
Originally posted on the author's social media.
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