4/6 protest tests ability to unite against judicial authoritarianism

The demonstrations scheduled for next Sunday (4) are putting to the test the power of unity of those who are against the growing authoritarianism of the Judiciary in Brazil and the decision to impeach deputy Deltan Dallagnol (Podemos-PR). In recent days, the disagreements between political groups that coincide in these agendas made the mobilization for the protest to fade, raising doubts about the dimension of the event.

Until Tuesday (30), the Movimento Brasil Livre (MBL) was the main organizer, which had been keeping supporters of former president Jair Bolsonaro (PL-RJ) away from taking to the streets. On Tuesday, the MBL announced that it will no longer participate in the demonstration because it “has been sabotaged by some wings of Bolsonarism” and because it feels despised by Deltan.

“Our militancy was summoned for adhesives and acts with banners; our leaders were organizing themselves in all the cities where the acts would take place. All of this we did under attacks from Bolsonaristas and with little solidarity from other agents. Even from Deltan himself, we have seen its effort to disassociate and distance itself from the MBL”, justified the group in a statement.

Former member and current opponent of the MBL, São Paulo councilor Fernando Holiday (Republicans), who supports the defended agendas, but is against participating in the 4/6 protests, said via Twitter that the group “argued because it had to swallow the irrevocable truth: like it or not, Bolsonaro is the greatest right-wing leader in the country”. Before MBL’s withdrawal, Holiday had posted: “If it’s to return to the streets, let it not be by the hands of these people!”.

Without the MBL, the event’s main mobilizer is now the Vem Pra Rua movement – ​​which, like the MBL, was one of Bolsonaro’s main allies until 2019, but antagonized the former president and his supporters in the following years.

In recent days, Vem Pra Rua has been appealing to the discourse of the need for unity. “On the other side, everyone is united”, says a poster calling for demonstrations. “Until we unite Brazil against abuse and mismanagement, we will accumulate defeats to the point where it will be irreversible,” the group said in a post on Twitter. “Union is our main challenge as a Brazilian right, but it is also our only chance to rebalance Brazil’s political game,” he said in another.

Parliamentarians such as Senator Sergio Moro (União-PR) and deputies Marcel Van Hattem (Novo-RS), Luiz Philippe de Orleans e Bragança (PL-SP) and Deltan himself have also highlighted the need to overcome differences against the authoritarianism of the Judiciary.

“We live in a democracy. We won’t agree on everything. It’s normal to have disagreements. Now, when you’re faced with arbitrariness, with excesses, with mismanagement, with a government of revenge, with courts crossing the lines of the law on our freedoms… There is an escalation. You have censorship. You have political prisoners. Now you have the impeachment of political opponents. Where will this end? What will happen tomorrow if I don’t act today, if I don’t take to the streets today, if I don’t demonstrate today?”, questioned Deltan in a recent interview with Pânico, on Jovem Pan.

Bolsonaro supporters are in doubt about participation in the protest

Even without the MBL in the equation, some Bolsonaro supporters see other barriers to attending the event.

In general, they approve of the agenda of the protests, but take into account a recent statement by the former president, who asked his supporters to avoid demonstrations for the moment. For him, it is necessary to focus now on the CPMI on January 8th.

“This CPMI is very important for us, more than any other movement that anyone might want to do out there. I even ask: don’t do it. The most important thing for us at the moment is the CPMI. I see people wanting to set up a meeting, people in street… I ask: don’t do that”, Bolsonaro said on the last day 25, at the National Meeting of Presidents of the PL.

The speech is in line with what personalities close to the former president have expressed. The former head of the Special Secretariat for Social Communication (Secom) of the Bolsonaro government, Fabio Wajngarten, warned against the protests on the same day as Bolsonaro’s statement.

“It is more than necessary to assess who was actually on the side of the government in the last 4 years before leaving supporting and promoting opportunist manifestation. The right insists on being a wagon and towed by those who never managed to be a locomotive”, stated Wajngarten.

Parliamentarians close to the former president but who have already publicly sympathized with Deltan after the impeachment have been silent about the 4/6 demonstration. This is the case, for example, of deputies Nikolas Ferreira (PL-MG) and Bia Kicis (PL-DF).

Deputy Carla Zambelli (PL-SP), who had summoned her followers on social networks to the 4/6 demonstration, published a video on Instagram apologizing for her attitude and saying that she had not seen Bolsonaro’s position.

In addition to the lack of engagement by the parliamentarians closest to the former president, another barrier to the participation of Bolsonaro supporters in the demonstrations is the degree of solidarity with Deltan. Many of them accuse the deputy from Paraná of ​​opportunism in his recent approach to the political group.

Deltan, in turn, says he understands that the former president does not get involved in 4/6. “I respect President Bolsonaro and I would never demand that he go to the streets, or that he have any position at the front, not least because, if he defends going to the streets, he can be held responsible for anything that happens. Now, I will be with those Brazilians who love Brazil, are brave and want to defend justice, freedom and democracy on June 4”, commented the deputy to Jovem Pan.

Right still has difficulties putting agendas above divergences, say analysts

Lucas Berlanza, president of the Liberal Institute, sees the aversion to the presence of movements that opposed Bolsonaro as a lack of sense of proportion. “The current destruction of Brazilian democracy, all of a sudden, is not serious enough for us to take to the streets”, he ironizes. “Contrary to what this discourse preaches, the June 4 demonstrations are being called by different organizations, some of them heavily attacked by the MBL, such as Novo and deputy Marcel van Hattem. The seriousness of the problem should be enough for us to admit even social -democrats who agreed with the need to curb judicial authoritarianism by participating alongside us. The difficulty of understanding this demonstrates a lack of willingness to put the defense of democratic principles in the foreground”, he comments.

The inability to overcome divergences in the name of specific agendas, according to him, has its origin in the very way in which Brazilian democracy has developed. “Brazil has a scarce party tradition. Our parties are constantly destroyed and remodeled as regimes are changed. On the other hand, we have a strong personalist and Sebastianist tradition. This terrain is propitious for charismatic leaders to capture agendas and movements and overlap with a clearer and more solid definition of political principles and programs”, he says.

For him, the moment is serious enough to put aside electoral disagreements. “Unfortunately, in the end, the MBL itself also withdrew from participating, giving in to internal tensions and disagreements, which I consider deeply wrong and another way of not putting the national scene in the foreground”, he says.

For political scientist Paulo Kramer, excessive internal fragmentation is a normal phenomenon in incipient political movements, such as the new right in Brazil. “If you look at our recent past, until the end of the last century, the Brazilian left was also very divided. Before, there was that traditional division within communism between Stalinists and Trotskyists. a discussion within the left about whether they supported a process of basic reforms, within the constitutional order, called basic reforms, or whether the left should take a more daring position of accelerating the revolutionary process”, he recalls.

The division of the new right, he points out, is part of the creation of the identity of this new political movement. “Perhaps it is the movement’s growing pains. First, it is necessary to go through a process of self-identification. Until recently, until 10, 20 years ago, few people had the courage to come out as right-wing.”

As for the focus of the manifestations on the figure of Deltan, Kramer sees this as an advantage. “When you individualize a demand, when you give it a face, it becomes easier for people who are not so politicized to join the mobilization. It is easier for people to fight for someone who exists, for an identifiable human face, than by abstract ideas.”