Jair Bolsonaro’s government is over | Opinion

Bolsonaro is going through his worst time – so far – as President of Brazil. The convergence of various phenomena projects a very negative outlook for the future, in which its main project, re-election, is strongly questioned. Worst, He even transmits to his supporters the image that he has lost his governance, that he no longer governs, that he has no answers to the major problems affecting Brazil.

His government is paralyzed, as if it were coming to an end. Economic policy is not moving and, worse still, is strongly threatened by the prestige of Lula, to which the government responds by appealing to measures that the right describes as “populist”, violating the rules of budgetary adjustment. Its economic policy tends to stagnate, at the very moment when the economic recession is strongest and the social crisis generalized.

There is no policy against the pandemic and the government, instead of accelerating vaccines, appears to be an obstacle to vaccination and protection of the population. The number of cases and deaths is increasing exponentially and the president does not agree with the vaccines. There is a sense of government emptiness, that the country is on the brink of a precipice, with no one trying to stop it. Despair takes hold of the population.

At the moment, two phenomena, of a different order, crystallize the crisis and try to give it a way to overcome it. The prosecution proposes to remove from Bolsonaro the functions of economic, health and political coordination. One way to declare him incompetent to lead the country, in the worst crisis in its history.

Clean Paulo guedes, Minister of the Economy, resigned from his failed economic model, declaring that, without mass vaccination, the economy will not recover. (Before the pandemic, he did not recover either.) As there is no sign of mass vaccination, neither the government nor will they vaccinate, in practice the government has no more economic policy, in the worst economic crisis the country was already facing.

The government is also not facing the pandemic, being seen by increasingly large sectors of the population as the main culprit of the pandemic. There is no government policy to deal with it and, on the contrary, the negationist discourse that Bolsonaro supports, blocks any solution to the thousands of deaths that the country is accumulating. And, according to the third point of the prosecution’s request, the government is not coordinating anything. It is an uncoordinated government, which sabotage the action of governors, What try to block them in the Supreme Federal Court.

In short, there is no more government, Bolsonaro’s government is exhausted. The episode of the attempt to change the Minister of Health was the last straw for the inability and unwillingness of the government to do anything to continue to rule the country. It turned out to be a scam. And it is a government that puts an end to melancholy. If he survives, it will be a corpse, a caricature of the government, unable to prevent the country from collapsing on the precipice to which this same government led him.

What does a country do under these conditions? There is no vacuum in politics. What the government is not doing, others are trying to do. The prosecution offers a way out of the crisis. It can be directly by indictment, when parliamentary support is crushed, starting with Centrão, due to the pandemic crisis and the political resurgence of Lula. What matters is that the country is starting to wonder if, with Bolsonaro, this is no longer possible. It is that all the fundamental problems that the country faces collide with him as president.

It happens as Lula reappears politically and begins to act, in Brazil and outside Brazil, remembering what a president is dealing with the country’s problems. In interviews with international media, Lula calls on Biden, Macron and Merkel to organize a G20 meeting to discuss the poorest countries’ access to vaccines. It is not only Lula’s favoritism in the 2022 elections that puts pressure on the government, but the style of government, the dialogue with all forces, the way of joining forces, to bring solutions to Brazil.

Any solution to the worst crisis the country is going through goes through Lula. Not just in the 2022 election. Until then, a lot of time and many lives are in danger. Bolsonaro’s government ends, melancholy. Now is the time to save democracy. No solution outside of democracy responds to Brazil’s needs and emergencies.