Fiesp: what history teaches about the opposition to Josué – 01/17/2023 – Market

An opposition formed against a president because he feels discredited, alienated from the center of power. This is the story of Fiesp today, and of Fiesp 20 years ago.

Between 1998 and 2004, the entity was chaired by Horácio Lafer Piva. Like Josué Gomes da Silva, removed from command by an assembly held this Monday (16), Piva comes from a traditional family of big industry. On one side, Klabin, on the other, Coteminas.

Both, by all indications, messed with a wasp’s nest. In his management, Piva fired 4,000 people (including in the Sesi and Senai account), among them many sponsored by union leaders who orbit Fiesp, according to reports at the time.

In his plan to modernize the entity, at a time when the industry was undergoing a reconfiguration due to trade liberalization, Piva centralized power, dismantled departments and attacked perks. Path that Joshua seemed to be treading.

Even in terms of personality the two look alike. Like Josué, Piva was seen as closed off and not very skilled in the entity’s daily politics.

Between the two mandates, only one president: Paulo Skaf – who could not be more different from both.

Skaf is not a traditional entrepreneur. His critics even like to point out that he is an industrialist without an industry. He himself likes to tell his story as a narrative of the rise of the underdog, on the margins of the sector’s elite, which, nevertheless, dominated the main spokesperson of the industry in the country.

Another way of telling this story, however, is that of a skilled politician who knew how to unite around himself the interests of low-weight union leaders, symptoms of a weakened industry, who live from and for Fiesp.

This is how Skaf managed to get elected for the first time and, by all indications, this is how he seeks to return to power now, although he officially denies any connection with the rebellion faced by Josué.

There is, however, an important difference between the two moments. In addition to the minor dissatisfaction expressed by unions with lack of space in departments and councils and discredit, there was genuinely political opposition to the change in position that the current president was implementing.

In the 17 years that Skaf led Fiesp, the entity moved more to the right, to the point of explicitly supporting former president Jair Bolsonaro (PL).

Although it is common to attribute to Skaf the responsibility for this displacement, it was already taking place, a reflection of a diminution of Fiesp. From a forum for the great national industry in its heyday, the entity has weakened at the same pace as the sector.

Far from the caricature of the big capitalist, most of the business community that frequents the building on Avenida Paulista today has a profile much closer to the middle class. Leads small and medium businesses, fragile, dependent on caresses and favors. He lives from hand to mouth, as described by a great industrialist.

Skaf is, in fact, both symptom and parasite of deindustrialization. This is the core of the representativeness crisis that has been plaguing Fiesp for decades.

Josué is a stranger in the nest, a survivor of an elite against which the mass of small and resentful people –in other words, bolsonaristas– turns.

The current rebellion seems to be, finally, the exhaustion of a symbol that is emptying itself.