Article by Alternativa Socialista and Luta Socialista – PSOL
With the party conventions finished, we have the complete scheme of these municipal elections throughout Brazil. The bourgeois democratic regime as a whole is heading toward running electoral campaigns in the midst of a pandemic – still with a high rate of infections and deaths per day – and a scandalous rise of unemployment, poverty and hunger in the population.
Bolsonaro and the right are divided
Bolsonaro tried to strengthen himself and reach these elections with a structure that would strengthen him for 2022, but his plans are once again not going as expected. Besides not having legalized his party, “Alianza Brasil”, forcing Bolsonaristas to appear on other lists, the “Renda Brasil” recipe did not work and, with it, the plan to sustain the good results in the polls is moving away. That is why a large part of his old allies prefer to keep their distance, presenting themselves as right-wing or extreme-right alternatives in their municipalities, without appearing linked to the president and his government. Thus, without Bolsonaro as a unifier, the scenario on the right is one of dispersion.
In the center left, anything goes
Dispersion is not just the right’s heritage. In progressivism and the center-left there is also dispersion and high levels of electoral pragmatism that has nothing to offer the working class or poor people that it claims to represent. Electoral fronts that include parties of the left, center left, center right and right were formed. The PT with the PSL (the extreme right-wing party that brought Bolsonaro to power) in some cities are scandalous expressions of “anything goes” in politics.
PT, PCdoB, PDT, Rede, PSB, among others, sew electoral agreements in the service of maintaining their spaces of power. They do not express anything new for the people who have already gone through the disillusionment caused by these political projects at the service of corporate profits and against the needs of the people.
The PSOL walks with the wrong compass
The debates between the currents that are part of the PSOL have deepened in these pre elections. The current majority leadership of the party decided, in an Electoral Resolution voted in the National Directory, that the tactic in these elections would be to form fronts with parties of the progressive arc such as the PT or the PCdoB, among others. A tactic that responds to the policy of forming an anti-fascist or anti-Bolsonaro political agreement.
The mistaken characterization of the government as fascist and strong is not new and is part of the debates that have been expressed in different documents and instances. Sectors of the radical left of PSOL have expressed our total disagreement with our comrades, supported by a scientific analysis of the situation in our country, characterizing the right-wing government that has been going through a cyclical crisis since its inauguration and is far from becoming fascist or bonapartist type of government.
This disorientation has as a tactical consequence the unfortunate policy of forming electoral alliances with parties that do not represent the set of sectors that fight and rebel against the constant austerity and attacks. This is how fronts were defined in different cities such as Recife (Pernambuco) where the leadership, in an undemocratic way, lends itself in the role of “left advisor” to the mayoral candidate Marília Arraes (PT), forming a front that includes two parties of the center-right, the PTC (Christian Workers Party) and the PMB (Brazilian Women’s Party).
Assimilating to these, the opportunity to transform itself into a powerful left-wing and socialist political alternative that enchants and brings together large sectors is lost. For this reason, where PSOL presents its own candidacies and differs from the center-left, it expresses an alternative and begins to collect adherence and support, demonstrating that there is political space for a left-wing project, together with the working class and the poor people.
The alternative is the radical left
The results of these municipal elections are not going to represent solutions to the great problems that we suffer. But they will be an opportunity to strengthen the candidacies of the radical left throughout the country.
We postulate our candidacies as feminist, eco-socialist and anti-racist colleagues at the service of an independent, class based and socialist project. We put them at the service of strengthening each of our struggles and also of the most important battle, the construction of the political alternative that is needed to turn everything around and fight for those who have never governed, workers and the poor people, to rule. For this we militate and organize ourselves. Join us.
Luta Socialista and Alternativa Socialista / ISL, internal currents of the PSOL
Brazil, September 2020.