By Boaventura de Sousa Santos* – Article sent to Other News by the author
The future of Brazilian democracy is looking bright again despite the clouds on the horizon. The main reasons are as follows. The President of the Republic of Brazil, Lula da Silva, is today the most respected and admired leader in the world. His long political career and the unjust suffering he endured as a result of a lawfare conspiracy orchestrated by national and foreign political and legal forces that led to his imprisonment for 532 days speak for themselves. Frustrated by their failure to eliminate Lula da Silva’s political presence, these forces attempted, on January 8, 2023, to prevent him from taking office after being democratically elected.
Lula da Silva’s political stature is even greater today for another reason. It is inherent in democracies that elected leaders must coexist with a parliamentary opposition. Sometimes they have to live with two oppositions, one parliamentary and the other extra-parliamentary. It so happens that President Lula da Silva is perhaps the only democratically elected leader today who has to live with three oppositions: the parliamentary opposition; the opposition within his government, since it is a coalition government and therefore includes ministers who actively participated in various attempts to end his political career; and a third opposition, expatriated and self-exiled in the incubator of the global far-right movement that Washington has become.
This third opposition, scandalously led by a Brazilian congressman, Eduardo Bolsonaro, is today, in fact, a second Brazilian embassy in Washington. This embassy is so obsessed with subverting Brazilian democracy and resurrecting dead coup plotters that it does not hesitate to cause serious damage to the Brazilian economy and the well-being of Brazilians, including those who in the past voted for its cronies in the previous government. According to the World Health Organization, in the first year of the pandemic alone (March 2020 to March 2021), they were responsible for 120,000 deaths that could have been prevented if Brazil had adopted preventive measures such as social distancing and restrictions on gatherings.
This third opposition is unprecedented in the modern history of democracies. It represents an extreme and extremely contradictory manifestation of strength and weakness. Strength, because these opponents are proud to be behind the tariff aggression by Donald Trump, the master of international coup d’étatism, of which the far-right ambassadors (more correctly, demagogues) are low-ranking servants. They are also proud of having engineered the most grotesque and vulgar attack on a foreign judicial system in living memory, in the person of Federal Supreme Court judge Alexandre de Moraes, one of the most notable magistrates of our time, a magistrate who, alongside Baltasar Garzón (Spain), Raul Zaffaroni (Argentina and the Latin American Court of Human Rights), Albie Sachs (post-apartheid South Africa), Ruth Bader Ginsburg (US), and N.V. Ramana (India), today make up the framework of what an independent judiciary should be because it is committed to safeguarding and deepening democracy.
But in manifesting all this strength, this expatriate opposition, and with it all the right-wing and extreme right-wing opposition that sees itself in it, has contradictorily revealed all its disarming weakness. It had to hide in the shadow of a straw giant, which is by nature and self-interest also suicidal and incendiary, in order to strike Brazil and Brazilians with the hardest blow imaginable. It dared to sacrifice its own country to survive in its petty smallness. It was a resounding shot in the foot that will keep it lame for many years to come.
It is for these reasons that patriotism in Brazil is today, more than ever, democratic and left-wing. The fascists and coup plotters who wrap themselves in the green and yellow flag stain the flag with blood and ignominy. Left-wing democrats had better be aware of this, of the damage that this fifth column is causing to the country, and make such damage well known. It is crucial that they mobilize to proudly embrace patriotism, a constructive sentiment in defense of Brazilian sovereignty and democracy. A sentiment that has nothing to do with nationalist propagandists who, as becomes quite clear, always end up showing their true nature: traitors.
*Boaventura de Sousa Santos, sociologist. Retired Professor, Faculty of Economics, University of Coimbra (Portugal). Distinguished Professor, University of Wisconsin-Madison (USA).