It is not possible to understand the anomie of the federal government’s communication, nor the absence of a call for the mobilization of supporters
Image: Marcelo Camargo | April
Carlos Ferreira Martins*
That for the Lula government the traditional 100-day truce would not be valid, we all already knew and I wrote it here myself. At the end of the third month of government, nobody even remembers this civilized practice of the old democracies.
The federal government is mostly treated – and not only in the corporate media – as if it had been in power for more than half of its mandate and had not presented any results or news.
Nobody seems to remember the attempted uprising of January 8th anymore. AND fact that the blow was – for now – frustrated, but it is no less true that he had economic, political and military support that was only momentarily circumvented.
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To those who preach that Lula believes it’s 2003 and doesn’t realize how the world has changed in two decades, one might ask which president had to negotiate a budgetary PEC even before taking office? Or which president had to dismiss the commander in chief of the Army with less than a month in office?
Much more than most of his supporters, he is fully aware that he will have to live with a Congress marked by the gluttony of a centrão to whom the previous president outsourced the parliamentary initiative and by the significant growth of far-right deputies and senators, that swell the traditional BBB benches (of the Boi, of the Bullet and of the Bible) with exponents of root Bolsonarism such as Damares, Pazuello or Mourão.
At no time did the president make a point of hiding the guidelines from his ministers, both to avoid the announcement of measures or proposals not yet passed through the sieve of political evaluation and the need to recognize the legitimacy of parliamentary mandates.
It is not likely that Luiz Inácio changed his mind about the three hundred pickaxes with a doctor’s ring. But his experience and political realism know that in order to deliver his commitments to the population, which the corporate media deliberately downgrades to “campaign promises”, he needs to negotiate.
But he also knows that to negotiate you have to press. And that no one in his government has more legitimacy than he himself to do so. This is certainly the meaning of the response he gave to those who argued that it did not conform to the liturgy of office to publicly complain about scorching interest rates.
“If I, who was elected, cannot speak, who will I want to speak for me? The collector of recyclable material?”. The phrase, used by Mercadante as president of the BNDES, is worth an entire policy treatise that journalists trained by the market are incapable of understanding. Or pretend they don’t understand.
Lula, who is obviously not infallible, knows very well who he is and what he represents. She knows well that he was the only one capable of defeating the Bolsonaro anabolized by parliamentary complicity with his budget infractions; by fear of the Judiciary; by the active or omissive coup d’état of the military and by the undisguised support of the “market”.
He knows that he is the only one capable of mobilizing support at the height of the walls he has to face. Economists from various backgrounds, business leaders, Brazilian and foreign autuarists echoed the presidential statement that there are no structural reasons for Brazil to pay the highest real interest rate on the planet.
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Even a Nobel laureate in economics, Josef Stiglitz, declared that the rate practiced by the Central Bank is “shocking” and capable of “killing any economy”. As we have seen, the president of the Central Bank smiled and waved and the COPOM minutes raised the stakes, maintaining the rate and threatening the possibility of an increase.
While the trained journalists insist on the fantasy of the “technical position” of the Central Bank, the 82 Faria Lima operators surveyed by Genial/Quaest give reality, guaranteeing Bob Campos Neto the leadership shot as the “political leader” deserving of more confidence, with a portentous 68% of “a lot of confidence”, leaving behind the 40% of Tarcísio and Zema.
There is no doubt that Lula will remain cornered. It’s just not possible to understand the anomie of the federal government’s communication or the lack of call for mobilization of its supporters.
After all, Lula won by a small margin, but he won. And she didn’t make “promises”, she made commitments. That it will not be able to fulfill without support and mobilization.
*Carlos Ferreira Martins is a professor at the Institute of Architecture and Urbanism at USP São Carlos.
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