Entrepreneurs and workers, united for democracy in Brazil

A protest against Bolsonaro, this Thursday in São Paulo. Andre Penner (AP)

While the far-right president continues his attacks and openly threatens an authoritarian coup, thousands of Brazilians have launched a cry this weekend in defense of democracy.

For the first time, businessmen and workers, trade unionists, judges and lawyers, people of all religions and all races have been seen together, united against the far-right Jair Bolsonaro.

The demonstrations and the various documents read in favor of democracy were a response to Bolsonaro's shameful meeting days ago with dozens of ambassadors from all countries, in which the president questioned Brazil's voting system, precisely with the one in which he and three of his children were elected in 2018. The situation was very well defined in today's editorial of the newspaper

: “If President Bolsonaro deeply embarrassed the country by defaming Brazilian democracy before the ambassadors in Brazil, the response of society in defense of elections and democracy has made the country proud and excited”.

The former Minister of Justice, José Carlos Días, who read the manifesto of businessmen and bankers, stated: "Today is a bright moment in which capital and labor come together in defense of democracy."

And he added: "We are here celebrating with joy, with enthusiasm, the anthem of democracy."

One of these several manifestos reached, while it was being celebrated, a million signatures from the most diverse of society: teachers, students, domestic workers, magistrates and lawyers, taxi drivers, doctors, nurses, policemen, bankers, industrialists, people of the social class. media and the favelas.

At the end of the ceremony that took place at the University of São Paulo Law School, with thousands of people outside the building, everyone sang the national anthem together.

It was an unprecedented initiative, similar to the demonstrations of

, from the times of the dictatorship and in favor of the today threatened democratic institutions.

The editorial of

concludes: “Despite all the escalation of violence and threats by Bolsonaro against democracy, there continues to be a haughty country that does not want to be held hostage by the authoritarians and that will fight to defend its institutions, its elections and its democracy.

That is the deep and true Brazil.”

newspaper

stresses that the acts in favor of democracy were for the first time "the plural pact of different generations that brought together for the first time from 19-year-old students to a 97-year-old law professor who was present at the act."

At the meeting of the Faculty of Law in São Paulo, Manuela Morais stressed that Brazil continues to fight for a mature democracy: “We, who were the others, are now part of this letter to the Brazilians.

We are young, black, peripheral, a new intelligentsia that is the product of the public school, the ravines and the favelas.”

The various letters in favor of democracy under threat arrive at a decisive moment.

The great distance that existed until yesterday between the two presidential candidates, Bolsonaro and former President Lula da Silva, has begun to shrink, which is worrying progressive forces.

Bolsonaro has the state machine and has begun to use billions of reais as an incentive to vote for him.

The stagnation in support for Lula, who for months did nothing but grow in the polls, is worrying the organizers of a campaign that begins in a few days and that already seems like a titanic struggle.

Social networks have been filled with merciless attacks against Lula, whom today they call a "thief" and "ex-convict."

Evangelical Christians, who overwhelmingly support Bolsonaro, dust off old videos of the former president – ​​who declares himself a practicing Catholic – attending an African Umbanda religious rite in which he is blessed.

The image generates a lot of controversy considering that Bolsonaro's wife, who is a fervent evangelical, performs her own rites in the presidential palace to "cast out demons" from those rooms that were once "occupied by communists."

In his own campaign, Bolsonaro seeks to convince that he is the greatest defender of freedom of expression and that the media is "at the service of capital."

Bolsonaro promises that he is the standard-bearer in the fight of good against evil, in which the evil that devastates Brazil would be communism, read, Lula.

According to the president, the great mistake of the military dictatorship was not having killed 30,000 more people, referring to the left that appears in his eyes as the demons that poison the country.

To the letters read on Sunday throughout the country in favor of the values ​​of democracy, the president has reacted with derision, calling them "little letters" and boasting that his only letter is the Constitution.

A fallacy, since it is precisely he who does not miss an opportunity to attack the Magna Carta, which he intends to modify to end its secular character and turn it into an evangelical Constitution.

The Bolsonarist motto is “God above everything”.

The big question is who is this god that inspires him when he yearns for the dictatorship, defends torture, sows hatred against the country, despises women and those who are different, and is destroying culture, education and science, while he and His wife sees living demons in everything that bears the stamp of the values ​​of freedom of belief and thought.

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