Haddad: "I do not know what led Gleisi to Caracas, you have to take care of communication" | Brazil

Question The PT sent its president to the inauguration ceremony of Nicolás Maduro, isolated by almost every country in the region. Why does PT support Maduro?

Answer I would like to place this discussion on a somewhat different plane. Without Lula's personal mediation during his government, the United States would have intervened in Venezuela.

P. But years pbaded, many things happened after that …

R. The obsession of the Brazilian left must be with peace, with non-interference. Obviously, the situation in Venezuela has deteriorated. And the environment in Venezuela today is not democratic. Because the parties do not recognize the processes.

P. But should this degradation of the democratic environment only be attributed to the opposition?

R. I believe the Maduro government has some responsibility. It is clear that there is no huge commitment on the part of the opposition. It would be naïve to imagine that the opposition did not have its interests, especially to maintain the previous status quo, that of Venezuela as a backyard full of oil for the Americans. The PT's obsession is to find a way to restore Venezuela's democratic environment. It is difficult. This is not an easy task. But this can become even more difficult if there is a military intervention.

P. Have you been in possession of Maduro?

R. I did not participate in the discussion, I do not know the arguments and what led Gleisi Hoffmann to go to Caracas. I think a question is important, the message you give when you make a decision. It is necessary to take care not only of what you think is more appropriate, but also to communicate it to the world public opinion.

P. The PT's justification for not attending the inauguration ceremony of Bolsonaro is that the democratic process was inadequate due to Lula's arrest. Do you think Venezuela has a more transparent democratic process than Brazil?

R. These are different situations.

P. Why?

R. Brazil's question is that the research officer could not participate in the elections.

P. In Venezuela too. The opposition Leopoldo López is under house arrest.

R. What I say and repeat: the PT obsession with which I share is to avoid a military conflict in the region. Brazil has been without military conflict for more than 140 years with its neighbors. The pacifist center-left obsession is to seek a negotiated solution. Another problem is to communicate well what you want to communicate with your gesture [a ida de Gleisi à posse de Maduro].

P. Can his departure be understood as a seal of the PT for the Maduro government?

R. The PT was born from the questioning of leftist dictatorships

P. Does the Maduro government envisage a dictatorship?

R. What I said during the campaign and I repeat is that the environment in Venezuela is not democratic. Venezuelan political forces do not respect today the result of any of your requests. See how many consultations have taken place over the last three years with the Venezuelan people, no results have been considered legitimate.

P. To what extent does the PT attempt to get closer to the Venezuelan opposition?

R. Then I am asked what I think is not necessary in the opinion of the PT. To know what PT thinks, you have to interview Gleisi. What I think and defend in the campaign is: I have not changed my mind.

P. You have already said that Bolsonaro was a threat to democracy. Do you still see it like that?

R. If you have a strict concept, tanks on the street, someone is armed and threatens you … In this concept of democracy, the threat may be farther away. But if you understand democracy as an environment where certain values, including the protection of minorities, are cultivated, democracy is undoubtedly threatened in this respect. LGBTQ community members, teachers and leaders of social movements feel threatened, as they can be considered by the president as terrorists at any time. The opposition feels threatened because it has announced that it would act in two ways: the chain or the exile. This concept that I believe in democracy, yes, is under threat. Institutions must work for a specific purpose, so that people feel safe, regardless of their opinion, their badual orientation.

P. Congress and the Federal Supreme Court are unwilling to counterbalance these measures?

R. We will see. The signals from the executive are the worst possible, so we need to see if the counterweights will work. We will see how the press, the judiciary and Congress react to these real threats.

P. What is the role of the PT in opposition?

R. The PT has already been opposed to Brazil. Until 2002, we were an opposition party. And the PT made a very qualified opposition at the time. So much so that he achieved results during the 2002 campaign [quando Lula foi eleito pela primeira vez] and that the transition from Fernando Henrique to Lula was a very calm and civilized transition, which shows that the relations between the opposition and the situation in Brazil remained stable. We have returned to the opposition since the dismissal of Dilma, but we had 13 years of government, which means we will be able to form a much more nuanced opposition than ever before.

P. What would be your role in the PT in the years to come?

R. My role is what I used to do, and now I have to practice: I do not have a job, but I have never held this position before coming to power, and I have not missed fully exercise my citizenship as a teacher and articulist. Recalling that Lula himself never needed positions to exercise his citizenship, speak with the country, speak with other democratic forces on the continent and in Europe.

P. Do you want to badume the presidency of the PT?

R. This is not in my plans. I have never been part of the party bureaucracy, I have never participated in the internal life of the party except as a guest, as a university professor.

R. One thing has nothing to do with the other. Both are true. When you are government for four mandates, there is a process of distance from the basics because most executives are badimilated by the state machine. It's a very unpleasant, unfortunate process, but it happens. The electoral success of the PT weakened the party itself in its connection with the bases. The other phenomenon is the political, ethical and economic crisis that has occurred

. The other problem is that there are new players in Brazil. For example, evangelical churches had a size when we won in 2002 and now have another size. And we do not learn to dialogue with the base of this church, let alone with the leaders, who are generally quite conservative.

P. How to recover the red belt, traditional red light in São Paulo and where since the municipal elections of 2016, you lose ground?

R. I think that there will be a natural process of moving the party from the state machine to the base. And in this reconnection, there will be an apprenticeship. Let's meet another country. Many fruits even of the success of our governments, but that does not necessarily identify with our values. It is not given to a man who leaves poverty to maintain his egalitarian values, for example.

P. Some badysts say that the PT has fallen victim to its own mistake: getting people out of poverty, but not forming citizens. How do you badyze this criticism?

R. I think we should have worked harder on the issue of political consciousness. The objective advance was to be accompanied by a subjective advance. The material advance must come accompanied by a spiritual advance. All these elements must be brought together for the process to be consolidated. Spiritual not in the religious sense, but in the ethical sense of values. Ethics must be the obsession of a party that transforms the material life of people. If you dissociate it, people attribute their own success to questions that … Of course, everything also depends on the individual effort, but this must accompany a political training process.

P. The pillar of criticism made to the PT is corruption.

R. What was the government's duty? Strengthen anti-corruption mechanisms. It is up to a progressive government to strengthen all the state's anti-corruption mechanisms. And no one did it better than the PT. The federal police have never been as good as in the PT government. The gaps of the federal public prosecutor. The Court of Auditors, the judiciary, the Comptroller General of the Union … They have never acted so much. There would never be a fight against corruption without these measures. And there has never been a directive from the government to stop the investigation. All legislation used in the lava flow has been approved by PT governments.

This is a point. Another point: in addition to strengthening combat mechanisms, you need to strengthen institutions to avoid corruption. At this point, I think we have not endorsed the political reform. Because we knew it was part of our government's plan to defend the public fundraising campaign. The PT has always known that there is a great vulnerability of the system by allowing, not those who invented the rule, the private financing of election campaigns rather than by the private sector. And that affected the entire political system, without exception.

When you authorize business financing, you create an environment in which individual decisions matter. And when individual behavior speaks more than institutional behavior, you run a very high risk that someone is mistaken on your behalf and makes you vulnerable. The truth is that the money was asked in the political system without any protocol. And that became the rule in all parties. And that paved the way for small crimes and huge crimes.

P. What weight will Lula have in coordinating the PT as an opposition?

R. The Lula will always be heard.

P. Do you think that Lula is even more of an badet than a burden for the party?

R. Suppose the following scenario happened: they found a dollar account of Lula and Marisa in a tax haven. If it was something like that, "it's here". If they had presented convincing evidence to the party that there was indeed a fault, a crime and that being a Brazilian citizen should answer for it, I think we were there. would have regretted, but we would have moved on to something else. But this is not what happened. I personally got involved in the trial of the triplet and I badure you that it does not support. There is no complete proof, as happened to others who are imprisoned. With them, he is there: he counts abroad, money in the bag, a recorded dialogue … So, yes, he is an badet.

P. In which area should the opposition act?

R. There are two important components. A broader area, namely the area of ​​civil rights advocacy, which, in my opinion, is under threat in Brazil. We find that indigenous rights are under attack, contrary to what the Federal Constitution says. We have seen the government questioning very delicate environmental issues, international treaties signed by Brazil [ameaçados] … The United Nations being implicated in all its decisions and directives, we have just come out of the pact on the 39, immigration, that is to say that we are a country that has been signed by immigrants. We see the LGBTQ community threatened in the streets without the authorities making a judgment in this regard. We find that teachers are under threat of surveillance. There are therefore very worrying symptoms.

There is another regime of social and economic rights. It includes a policy of valuing the minimum wage, the destination of our public badets, our oil reserves, our foreign exchange reserves, our state, the fate of policies to promote income equality in the country. One of the most unequal countries in the world, labor rights. a first wave of liberalization and non-protection reforms for workers was announced, and a second round of reforms was announced to place the worker in a situation of increased vulnerability to capital. Social rights related to public services, including health and education, which fall under the jurisdiction of the …

P. The PT is too busy to make mistakes. Have you talked about political reform, is there anything else?

R. I always take the same consideration. We were very wrong not to carry out political reforms, we should have tried to do it, and I think that the conduct of economic policy after 2012 was a problem. And the way we tried to solve these problems after re-election was also a mistake.

P. The PT was apparently surprised by a WhatsApp network well structured by the Bolsonaro campaign. Do you plan to invest in this tool for the eyes in 2022?

R. We are talking about WhatsApp, but in reality, this tool was accompanied by three illegal files [por parte da campanha de Bolsonaro]: the first was to turbinate the application with box 2. The second was to use a third party registration. And the last was to slander opponents with lies. I owned a Ferrari 500 000 reais, I was in favor of incest … Three offenses were committed.

P. But apparently, his campaign had a structured network for longer and more experience in its use.

R. It is yes. We could have done it. But what really benefited his offer at the end of the second round was not. Because if that was it, he would have already advanced. He always beat 18% of the voting intentions. It was only 20%. What had made this landing, it was first the stabbing that took to 26%. And after that, he only grew up with the illegal use of WhatsApp.

P. Ciro Gomes, whom you called a friend, beat the PT a lot during the campaign. Have they returned to dialogue?

R. Look, you resume the dialogue with which you want to dialogue. Cyrus's statements were very severe. I think he's describing some episodes that are not so. The episode PSB, for example. The PSB has reached an agreement with the PT, published with transparency: we supported Paulo Câmara in Pernambuco in exchange for his support to Fernando Pimentel in Minas and national neutrality. It was a PSB building. It comes from the democratic game.