By RUI COSTA SANTOS*
The left that governs to stay in power based on the institutional and social powers that really exist gives up on transforming the world in favor of the social classes that elected it.
There are many differences between a government led by Joe Biden and the US Democratic Party and Lula and the Broad Front that elected him along with Geraldo Alckmin as vice president.
Let's start with the most basic: the USA is still the world's leading economic and military power, while Brazil is characterized by being a peripheral economy or subject to the articulations of a world economy that is made up of a small group of central economies and a large majority of nations and economies that have relations of dependence and subordination in relation to the former.
From an economic-political point of view, this was called imperialism in world capitalism, without implying the colonization and effective political submission of these nations as in the previously hegemonic colonial-type imperialism.
Two weeks ago, the PT and the Brazilian left-wing parties were able to confirm what the polls had already indicated: the low popularity of the Lula government, the rise of the right and extreme right, which in Brazil is not only concentrated in Jair Bolsonaro, but has seen the emergence of other figures – Tarcísio de Freitas, Pablo Marçal – and if Jair Bolsonaro remains ineligible in 2026, one of these figures could be the candidate who will oppose the candidate supported by the PT, most likely Lula, or if he does not want to, Fernando Haddad, current Minister of Finance.
There has been vehement criticism from sectors of the Brazilian left of some of the current government's policies: public-private partnerships that replace public services offered directly by the State and managed by it, a new budgetary balance law that replaces the one that had been approved previously and maintains it in its main lines, conditioning the implementation of public policies and causing cuts in social benefits, as a form of retirement intended for those who did not make contributions to social security because they did not have a signed employment contract.
The continuation of the current government's macroeconomic policies in relation to the governments of Jair Bolsonaro and Michel Temer that preceded it is justified by the lack of a majority in the legislative chamber and by the fact that the government was elected based on an alliance between the main party of the Brazilian left (PT) and center-right parties.
However, just as in the past, Dilma Rousseff was removed from office on the initiative of the right-wing party that occupied the vice-presidency, the same could happen by 2026, or without the need for that, as long as the same parties that now share the government with Lula form an alliance with the extreme right in 2026 and defeat the PT.
In any case, the first weakness to which a government is exposed is that it does not govern for those who elected it, because although they did not give them the institutional power that they do not have, they gave them access to that same institutional power by electing them. The left that governs to stay in power based on the institutional and social powers that really exist gives up on transforming the world in favor of the social classes that elected it. Having no other power or mechanism of influence, they end up increasing abstention or adhering to the discourse of the extreme right. Today it was Donald Trump, tomorrow it could be Jair Bolsonaro again. And today it is Marine Le Pen, led by Emmanuel Macron.
*Rui Costa Santos is a lecturer in Portuguese at the University of Granada and a former professor at the University of Puerto Rico.
the earth is round there is thanks to our readers and supporters.
Help us keep this idea going.
CONTRIBUTE
