Green light for PT – 07/21/2023 – Demétrio Magnoli

The Maduro dictatorship suffered its toughest diplomatic defeat in Brussels. The joint declaration that calls for “fair, transparent and inclusive elections, allowing the participation of all who wish, with international monitoring” is the opposite of the farcical plea prepared by the Venezuelan regime, which disqualified the three main opposition leaders and announced a veto to the presence of European observers. Brazil, Argentina and Colombia, governed by the left, signed the text alongside France and the European Union.

The initiative paves the way for the elimination of sanctions against Venezuela and, at the same time, outlines the roadmap for a peaceful transition towards democracy. It may come to nothing: Maduro knows that he would inevitably be beaten in free and fair elections. However, even in this hypothesis, the declaration has its value, as it marks a radical turnaround in the Brazilian position – and, with it, a disinterdiction of democratic opinion within the PT.

Lula’s resignation from the old alliance with the “fellow dictatorship” derives from internal political calculations. The pathetic support for the failed post-Chavista regime demoralizes Lulista’s denunciation of Bolsonarist authoritarianism and, as Planalto knows, has a strong negative impact on opinion polls. Finally, however, gestures and words gain the opportunity for a reunion.

The passage will not be painless or without painful contradictions. While signing the declaration, Lula proclaimed that “only the Venezuelan people” can solve the “problem” or the “situation” (terms he uses in place of “dictatorship”, in the case of left-wing dictatorships). It is a ritual password intended to criticize “external interference” – that is, diplomatic actions such as the one with which it was associated. But, in any case, by burning what he loved, Lula erases a red light. The PT can now condemn, with equal vigour, right-wing and left-wing dictatorships.

The PT was born at a unique historical crossroads, marked by the concomitant decline of Soviet totalitarianism and the Brazilian military regime. In its origins, the party had everything to lead a renewal of the Latin American left. During a long introductory chapter of the PT trajectory, weighty democratic voices contested the dogmas of internal Castroist currents. In an editorial now forgotten, the PT’s theoretical magazine repudiated the Cuban dictatorship, calling things by their name.

The red light only came on in the mid-1990s, when Lula declined an invitation to join the leadership of the Socialist International, preferring to establish a partnership with Fidel Castro’s regime. The option locked the party in the dark cavern of the old Latin American left.

Since then, the PT’s political discourse has split between the “inside” and the “outside”: the simultaneous celebration of Brazilian democracy and leftist dictatorships in Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua. The split provoked a perennial intellectual hemorrhage. Its product is party notes from the Secretariat for International Relations that seem to have been written by the gray Soviet bureaucrats of yesteryear, and also the typical manifestations of militants on social networks woven around buzzwords that are as anachronistic as they are stupid.

There are consequences. In Brazil, the vows of eternal love to the “right dictators” offered a field of legitimacy to the authoritarian nostalgia of the extreme right: if Maduro is ok, why not Geisel or Médici? Out there, newer (Chilean Boric) or traditional left leaders (Uruguayan Mujica, Colombian Petro) argue that dictatorships are always condemnable, threatening to displace Lulism to an almost archeological position.

Now, from Brussels, pressured by circumstances, Lula has cleared a path. PT won the right to think again. Will he know how to use it, so long after?

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