The Brazilian right has failed | Opinion

From Rio de Janeiro

The Brazilian right has always controlled power in Brazil, ever since it began to impose itself on indigenous peoples, oppress them and exploit their wealth.. Then, when he used the most monstrous phenomenon in the history of the world, slavery, which along with colonialism, are the two founding phenomena of Brazilian history.

Over time, this domination changed form, acquired a national character, but was never contained.. More than four centuries later, the Brazilian right was defeated by Getúlio Vargas in 1930 in a revolution that made the Brazilian right deeply anti-getulist. Supported by liberalism, he criticizes Vargas for his authoritarianism and for his policy of “buying” the conscience of the workers with concessions that he considers demagogic, such as increasing wages and the right to leave. unionize.

The Brazilian right has been systematically defeated by Vargas. He drove him to suicide, accused of corruption, but did not defeat him. When the right finally won, in 1960, it was with an adventurer: Janio Quadros, who inherited the banners of accusations of corruption and moralism, but whose victory lasted a few months and turned into another defeat.

The biggest victory of the right was not in democracy, but with the dictatorship, which succeeded in destroying democracy and much of the left, thanks to the most systematic repression that Brazil has ever known. Victory for the right for that and because it has designed an alternative to Latin American capitalism in crisis: economic growth with a dictatorial state. It was the biggest proposal of the Brazilian right for the continent.

A victory based on the overexploitation of workers and the destruction of democracy. He was exhausted, because the strikes led by Lula broke the wage freeze – the revered “economic miracle” – and the regime could no longer take it. The right has triumphed in the transition to democracy, preventing the direct election to the presidency of Brazil and limiting it to a process of restoring liberal democracy, without other forms of democratization – of access to land, to the media, to economic structures. Monopolies, the education system, among others.

The right wing again had a triumph for Pirro with the electoral victory of Collor, in 1989 – another adventurer, like Jânio Quadros – against Lula in 1989. His government was then defeated by corruption; a model saved by Fernando Henrique Cardoso placeholder image, like the last democratic victory of the right. It had a short lifespan, as the neoliberal model turned out to be a concentrator of income and incapable of recovering the growth of the economy.

Since, the right has accumulated an impressive losing streak, unprecedented in Brazilian history, at the hands of Lula and PT. And he only triumphed again with the collapse of democracy in 2016, whose coup led to the election of Bolsonaro.

The right has thus exhausted the repertoire of alternatives available to it for Brazil: military dictatorship, neoliberalism of Cardoso and Bolsonaro. The left proposed and put into practice several alternatives: PT governments with economic growth and income distribution, with a social and political strengthening of democracy.

In 2022, the right and the left will present the available alternatives so that the Brazilian people can choose the one that seems best to them among the different possible futures for Brazil. It will be a choice between right and left, between democracy and authoritarianism, between economic growth and financial speculation, between income distribution or its concentration. Between Lula and Bolsonaro.