Spanish version

The distance that separates the ultra-right votes of Bolsonaro and the rest of the ones that participated in the first round of the elections in Brazil last Sunday, has worked in fact as a second round one. Bolsonaro ended four points below the necessary ones to win the presidency of Brazil, close to fifty million votes – an advantage of eighteen million votes and eighteen percent points over the second one, the candidate of the PT, Fernando Haddad, supported by twenty nine million electors. No combination with the rest of the political forces that went to the polls could alter, within three weeks, the result favorable to the right –for that to happen exceptional factors should intervene.

The second round's dispute

The right, anyway, needs to reinforce the first turn's alluvium – a significant decrease of the votes’ difference would produce a weak government. Bolsonaro has already declared he has no intention in modifying his reactionary campaign in order to attract alien votes, precisely because of the need to establish a strong Executive that allows him to govern over the Congress. Haddad, on the contrary, pretends the rest of the candidates to participate of this election campaign, in an explicit Democratic Front. With this purpose he has meet even with the rightist Alckmin, the first preferred of the Brazilian bourgeoisie before rapidly changing to Bolsonaro, and with the banker Meirelles. Meanwhile the lumpen-politician Bolsonaro points to accentuate his rejection to the old political order, Haddad searches in this old order a life vest.  It is difficult, though, that he achieves it, since no one has yet accepted to come up his tribune, and they even had delayed the vote intention announcement.

The Brazilian political scenario is explained by the colossal magnitude of the systemic crisis of the social and political order of Brazil. The fiscal deficit (especially the financial one) is around the 10 % of the GDP, around 1.3 billion dollars; the public debt surpasses the hundred percent of the GDP, more than a trillion dollars; the industrial recession has entered its fourth year; the unemployment plus sub-employment reaches more than thirty million workers; Brazil has the highest rate of common crime victims’ casualties; the army intervenes in the security of several cities, remarkably in Rio de Janeiro. The worsening of the international economic and financial conditions and the financial and commercial war that has unleashed between its main powers, threaten to take Brazil into a default.  

 

Military revanchism

The political ascent of the social scum of Brazil obeys to several phenomena related in between. The most relevant one is the bankruptcy of the Popular Front experience, encouraged by the PT, which governed between 2003 and 2016 in close association with the Brazilian and international great capital, and with the corrupted main parties of the bourgeoisie. With the pose of constructing “national champions”, meaning the developing of Brazilian companies associated to international business, embarked itself in a huge scheme of corruption and in a ruinous subsidies policy. The very much spread economic support to the poorest families –a crumb in this feast – pretended to operate as the loincloth of the large crooked deals. The second factor of the political turn has been the miserable fail of the Temer government – fruit of the coup that overthrew Dilma Rousseff-, as overcoming the economic crisis and creating a stable political reference from its bosom is regarded. What, ultimately, characterizes this rightist onrush is the military high command operation, which has started to occupy strategic positions in the State – from the recovery of the Defense ministry to the military intervention in Rio.

The journalist from [Argentine paper] Ambito Financiero in Brazil has shown a detailed report about the military-political strategy since 2014 (10.8). El País [Spanish paper] informs that the commander in chief of the Army has imposed a reserve General as counselor of the new president of the Supreme Justice Court (10.5) – the equivalent of the Supreme Court in Argentina. Jair Bolsonaro is the political tool of the military high command – a coup under elections clothings. The military high command has attained to gather under its wing the parliamentary blocks of the ruralists and the evangelist churches, which find themselves camouflaged in political fronts with diverse parties. Besides, it has attained to impose in the Congress around seventy reserve militaries. The Brazilian bosses, which two decades ago helped Lula to government, has developed a coercion campaign among workers, to counter any propaganda against Bolsonaro and even demanding the vote for the rightist through internal communications.

 

Fascism, crisis, perspectives

It is true that the support to Bolsonaro is overwhelming in the higher classes and the rejection to the rightist is also high, according to an Ibope poll, among the Brazilian that earn a minimum wage, those who barely done primary education and the black population. It is clear, though, that millions of workers had voted the military agent overwhelmed by the economic crisis and the urban life decomposition. Brazil is not an exception in this regard; the collapse of the traditional left and the unions’ bureaucracy produces an atomization of the working class which turns it  into prey of the fascistic demagogy. According to the early information, the PT lost in the industrial ABC of Sao Paulo, and neither were elected its historical figures: Dilma Roussef and Fernando Pimentel, in Minas Gerais, Eduardo Suplicy, in Sao Paulo, and Lindberg Farias, in Rio de janeiro. It is not about, though, a regression of historical scope but conjunctural, which duration will depend on the evolution of the crisis on the whole and its political protagonists. The military tutelage of an elected government is a very dangerous operation.

The economic crisis, under the government of Bolsonaro, will have a greater scope than the one faced by Temer, because of the weight of the unsolved problems, in one hand, and because of the accentuation on the world crisis, in the other. Neither the Brazilian bourgeoisie, nor the Brazilian state have resources of their own to deal with a crisis of this magnitude. The Financial Times correspondent warns that “it is not clear is the rightist that leads the second turn would be even capable of accomplishing with what the markets wants in case he becomes into president” (LatAm Viva, 10.5). The mother of all battles –the retirements reform -, would test the capacity of all classes in dispute in defending its interests and objectives. In the capitalist class, and in the armed forces especially, a complete privatization of Petrobras or giving-in Embraer to Boeing, will unleash sharp conflicts.  These privatizations has been posed by the Bolsonaro’s Economy minister ‘in pectore’, Julio Guedes, a former Banco Pactual, in order to reduce the public debt with what is collected.

 

#Ele Nao [Not Him]

The elections has shown the collapse of the working class organizations (petists), as it has already occurred when the coup against Roussef. They neither confronted the Labor reform and the adjustment carried out by Temer’s government. Beyond their verbiage, they did not became aware that it was at stake a struggle against military vengefulness and its task-groups, that is why they did not call for direct action and mobilization; they handled elections as a bureaucratic procedure. That is what the women movement put into evidence with the mobilization, ten days ago, against Bolsonaro, under the slogan #Ele Nao, that they will repeat next October 20th – while the CUT, the UES and the MST are still paralyzed. The policy of the Democratic Front with the bosses’ parties (which repudiate the street struggle) and the resistance to the right with institutional means is incompatible with the people in the street. In the case of the women mobilization, we are in presence of a mass phenomenon, in the development of the present crisis, which will be the conducting thread for the exploited in the different instances of this crisis. In this line of action we call the working class unions and the peasants and the youth, for a campaign to convoke an elected Delegates Congress in order to discuss a class struggle policy against the fascistic candidate of the military apparatus and his eventual government.

As a party, we impulse the slogan and the methods of the women movement: #Ele Nao, to the streets, to the strike, to the formation of anti-fascist pickets. We do not support, thus, neither Haddad, nor the PT, nor its policies, we declare ourselves in opposition to them. We adhere and impulse with our policy the position to vote Haddad against Bolsonaro, i.e. not with the policy of the PT but with the policy that the feminine movement sketches. We adopt this position as a method to develop the unity and the convergence with the popular women movement which wins the street again against fascism.

 

Coherence

The Partido Obrero has developed an exemplar policy all through this crisis, from the impeachment of Roussef, which we characterize as a coup d’état (i.e. of all its institutions, especially the army), not as a parliamentary or palace one.  The second round will be a provisional culmination of this political development. In the past, we have called to vote the PT as a potential channel of development of the working class, with clear political differences with its leadership. In 1995, we called  to vote only its working class candidates, due to Lula’s inauguration of a Popular Front policy with a landowner as a vice-president. From there on we stop supporting the PT electorally, because it had become into the preferred tool of the bourgeoisie – we rejected voting it in 2002. Our present call is entirely different. The PT is the party of a clique in decomposition, not a struggle channel. We call for voting it against Bolsonaro, because it is a bridge with the masses that look for, despite de PT, a way to combat fascism.