By LUIZ WERNECK VIANNA*
The restoration of democratic culture depends on the muscles acquired by civil society entities in the fight for their claims.
The path that opens up to the Lula-Alkmin government is a ravine in which precision snipers and all sorts of enemies are entrenched on its banks committed to impeding its steps towards the reconquest of democracy. For this purpose, the root adherents of the Bolsonaro regime count less and more on sectors of the elites who feel threatened by the loss of privileges they enjoyed in the previous government. This will be a high-risk passage, requiring extreme expertise from those leading its conduction, certainly at a higher level than what happened during the course of the electoral campaign.
At the time of departure, his expertise is already tested by the lack of budgetary resources that would make the continuity of the Bolsa Familia program possible, a commitment shared by him with the government he succeeds, to which is added an equal need, in the face of the social crisis that afflicts the immense mass of vulnerable in situations of extreme poverty, the means to face the ills they suffer. In this dire circumstance, the elected government resorted to the heroic remedy of a constitutional amendment in order to achieve a budget allocation capable of minimally guaranteeing resources for the emergency response to the imperative needs of the population.
In this sense, the future government finds itself entangled in difficult negotiations with the Legislature, dominated for the most part by forces that opposed it in the electoral dispute, unless they favor an alternative path to constitutional amendment as a provisional measure as the first act of government. Undoubtedly, the recent decision of the STF that judged unconstitutional the secret budget and the powers that it granted to the heads of the legislative branch removes some strength from this power, but not to the point of leaving it unarmed in the face of the new government, which everything indicates will opt for the path reasonable negotiation of the constitutional amendment according to manifestations of its leaders, a process that now concludes.
In this case, the political forces of the Centrão regain the exercise of influential roles and, somehow, find their place in the incoming government. Everything as before in the Abrantes barracks, since the conciliation policy emerges as its distinctive mark, its way of walking the minefield that lies ahead, reiterating the style of the FHC government of reconciling the modern with backwardness under a slight predominance , where applicable, of the first.
Such will have to be the price to be paid, forced by the role of destruction that the Bolsonaro government leaves in its wake by invertebrating society in its simplest elements, in its scorched earth policy of organic social nexuses in accordance with the dictates of its inspiration neoliberal that this society thing does not exist. Replanting the destroyed social fabric will take time, persistence and clarity of purpose. It is about reviving trade union life, associative movements and left-wing political parties, in cities and in the agrarian world, the latter, today, sadly entrusted to the manipulation of agribusiness interests.
Giving encouragement to the modern, in a society like ours that has lived through decades of authoritarian modernization, it is important to establish a statute of full autonomy for its social beings, a task that calls for an active intellectuality that opens, through reflection, paths to new critical trajectories on the liabilities of our history and illuminate new possibilities for progressive actions.
The restoration of democratic culture depends on the muscles acquired by civil society entities in the fight for their claims, in order to circumvent the hostile scenario, currently configured in an adverse composition of congressional chambers, seeking space and opportunities that make possible the reunion of society with its best traditions.
The future is open, and, although we can find good inspirations in our past, it is demanding from us a spirit of discovery and audacious inventions in a demanding and challenging context, which we will only be able to face as we begin to walk, step by step. step by step, in the search for an egalitarian and fair society.
*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).
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