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The tectonic plates of politics move in Brazil

2023-03-22T05:06:55.508Z


The country needs to end the radical polarization between left and right to make way for a centrism with less populism


Lula has been ruling for barely 100 days and already the tectonic plates of Brazilian politics are restless.

It is because in the presidential elections the center left won the elections, but with a country divided almost in half, between those who bet on democracy and those who fight for the Bolsonaro right.

Two news items these days indicate that Brazilian politics is not pacified and that it will not be as easy for Lula to govern this time as in his past two governments.

According to polls these days, the majority of the country fears the return of communism with this Administration and 57% would like a government of the center to break the polarization between left and right.

The fear of communism, which is very irrational, is promoted by the most radical Bolsonaristas and the evangelical churches, which are instilled in them that communism would close temples and destroy private property.

It is undoubtedly an irrationality, but that the four years of Bolsonaro's government has been hammering away at the idea that the communists must be exterminated.

That managed to penetrate almost half the country.

It cannot be forgotten that the then fascist deputy came to lament that the military in the dictatorship had not murdered 30,000 communists, since it was not enough to torture them.

The democratic forces that in the last elections ended up voting for Lula's return, many of them just to prevent Bolsonaro from continuing in power, are already manifesting their desire for a democratic third way that governs in the center to end the struggle between the two extremes.

The idea that Brazil would need a government that would exorcise either the radical left or the fascist right ―something that Lula sensed when he surprised himself by presenting himself not only as the candidate of his party, the PT, but with a team more inclined to the center―, It was already seen in the last elections.

Many voted for Lula or annulled the vote just so that the extreme right would not return, and it was the candidate of the center, Simone Tebet, today Lula's minister, the third most voted.

All of this is stirring up politics and explains that, as soon as the new government started, there was already open talk of looking for a candidate who could collect all the votes of those who today do not want the return of Bolsonarismo and continue to fear a left-wing government.

In its editorial this Tuesday, the newspaper

O Globo

comments on the result that 57% would prefer a third way: "The majority opinion in the country reveals that the division between PT supporters and Bolsonar supporters that set the tone in the last two presidential elections have done more harm than good to the country."

And he concludes: "The Brazilian hopes that someone with political capacity and talent will emerge to know how to take advantage of it."

In this country where almost half of the voters are poor and with little political culture, there is a tendency to vote for someone who appears as a savior, a messiah, a father of the poor, someone chosen by God, which leads to all the candidates to become fervent believers during electoral campaigns, whether on the left or the right, as happened with Bolsonaro.

It is this atavistic need to look for some redeemer to govern the country that prevents the emergence of a candidate from the center capable of obtaining the necessary votes for the election.

And it is possible that this political hieroglyph from which Brazil suffers has ended up giving strength to two messianic characters like Lula and Bolsonaro, even when they are at the antipodes, preventing new candidates with courage from emerging but without the halo of the divine.

And this is what begins to worry as soon as Lula's progressive government has started, since it can lead to the fact that the fascist Bolsonarism can continue strong enough to contest the elections again.

Hence the need seen by those who fear a democratic crisis to end the radical polarization between left and right to make way for a centrism with less populism.

A government more connected with the developed countries, which are the ones that end up achieving a rational economic balance, the reduction of poverty and a society less martyred by the extremisms that end up suffocating democracy and leaving those who always end up enduring the ditch in the ditch. weight of extremist policies.

Perhaps one of the demons that worries the democratic world today is the resurgence of an extreme right that tries to revive the ghosts of the old dictatorships that we already know where they end up and who they end up sacrificing.

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Source: elparis

All news articles on 2023-03-22

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