Left loses monopoly on the streets and experiences paradox of order – 10/13/2023 – Power

The Esplanada dos Ministérios, in Brasília, was divided in half on April 17, 2016. On one side were those calling for the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff (PT); On the other, the president’s defenders closed ranks.

It would be an unthinkable scene just a few years ago. Since the struggles for redemocratization in the 1980s, the streets of Brazil have known only one protagonist in political and social demonstrations: the left.

“The right was in the closet, due to its association with the authoritarian period of the dictatorship”, says political scientist Lilian Sendretti, researcher at Cebrap (Brazilian Center for Analysis and Planning).

The left, in turn, occupied public space in the Diretas Já campaign, in the protests against Fernando Collor and Fernando Henrique Cardoso and in numerous demonstrations for social rights.

But the June 2013 Days and the “out, Dilma” campaign showed that the streets had no owner. Several right-wing groups entered the dispute for space; some did so within a democratic framework, while others, extremists, raised the banner of military intervention.

Many seemed to have lost the shame of the memory of the dictatorship, in a reversal of the historical meaning that gained momentum with Jair Bolsonaro (PL). For Sendretti, these moments consolidated a process that began before.

“Since the first Lula government, anti-leftist groups, so to speak, began to occupy the streets, even if in a timid manner”, says the researcher, referring above all to acts in the wake of the Mensalão.

Although these mobilizations were lower in density than those on the left, they indicated a certain effervescence on the right. According to Sendretti’s research, the boiling point arrived after Dilma’s re-election.

“From 2015 onwards, the dynamics of street mobilization changed, and the progressive field began to have its role under threat”, says the political scientist. “The right, for the first time since redemocratization, has a leading role in the streets.”

The image of the divided Esplanada dos Ministérios illustrates Sendretti’s point in two ways: by showing the right as an equal in the dispute over public space and by remembering that the left may have lost its monopoly on the streets, but has not abandoned them.

So much so that, according to the researcher’s records, only in 2022 will the (extremist) right return to mobilize more protests than the left. In other years, there are progressive sweeps – as in 2018, with more than 4 demonstrations for every 1 conservative – and narrow victories, as in 2019 to 2021.

For political scientist João Feres Júnior, who is a professor at Uerj (State University of Rio de Janeiro), some factors explain this situation over the last ten years, characterized by the retraction of the left and expansion of the right. Starting with resources.

“The left lost a lot of mobilization resources with the weakening of unions due to the end of the mandatory union tax,” he says. Before that, unions were already weakened by the precariousness of the world of work.

“We cannot forget that unions were the backbone of the social movements that pushed the democracy agenda on the streets from the end of the 1970s until the ill-fated June 2013”, he states.

Furthermore, having won consecutive elections, the PT, the main party of the Brazilian left, transferred part of the militancy to the administrative machine, taking away the vigor of the movements.

The right, in turn, took advantage of the window of opportunity and attracted a set of social and political forces that had anti-PT sentiment in common: business, religious and justice system elites, ultra-liberal groups, some politicians and the press.

From there, according to Feres Júnior, came the resources necessary for the marches for Dilma’s impeachment and the subsequent mobilizations until Bolsonaro’s election.

“Once elected, Bolsonaro inaugurated phase 2.0 of the mobilization of the extreme right, as he was able to use state resources to promote it, while he continued to count on a large part of the supporters of the coalition that joined to remove the PT from power” , he states.

According to the Uerj professor, the correlation of forces changes again in the third Lula government, but it is not easy to anticipate the result.

On the one hand, the right lost state resources and retreated after the January 8 coup attempt; On the other hand, Bolsonarism’s communication channels – the subject of Feres Júnior’s ongoing research – continued to disseminate disinformation.

As for the left, the problem of union resources was not resolved, while the PT in power once again represented a factor of relative demobilization.

Political scientist Rudá Ricci adds layers to the left’s problem. It’s not just about losing street space; for him, there are also defeats in the field of values.

“The left had cultural hegemony in the country, even during the dictatorship. Religious values, theater, music, visual arts, cinema, academia, in short, the most valued cultural production had strong leftist traits”, says Ricci, president of the Institute Cultivate.

He considers that changes such as the dispersion of the workforce in applications and other types of entrepreneurship have hit the theoretical and social bases that underpinned the action of the left.

Salaried work no longer attracts young people; values ​​such as self-effort, the defense of family and order, associated with liberalism and individualism, became more relevant in the periphery, closing the doors to a discourse aimed at the collective.

Furthermore, there has been a kind of role reversal between left and right in recent years.

“The broad Lulist coalition brings the PT closer to something like a ‘party of order’, guarantor of the balance of forces. The PT, to a certain extent, has become the main guarantor of the pact established with the New Republic”, says Ricci.

This is in one of the most unequal countries in the world, where frustrations continue to accumulate.

“What’s left? Personal effort and revolt. Those who channel the revolt in recent times are the extreme right”, says the political scientist, for whom “the left needs to reinvent itself”.

Or, in the view of Jonas Medeiros, researcher at Cebrap, the left needs to rescue certain attitudes that characterized it until the recent past and which, in the dispute with Bolsonarism, fell into the lap of the extreme right. The situation, however, involves paradoxes and contradictions.

Following the teachings of Olavo de Carvalho (1947-2022), Bolsonaro’s candidacy presented itself as anti-systemic: “But its objective was to legitimize very dominant social positions in gender and sexuality, ethnic-racial and even generational relations”, says Medeiros.

According to the researcher, the extreme right pushed the left into the position of defender of order by attacking democracy and the system designed in the 1988 Constitution, which institutionalized unprecedented rights for historically excluded groups.

Over 35 years, PT governments, among others, have deepened these achievements, so it makes sense to defend the system. Limiting itself to this, however, immobilizes the left in the face of transformations that, for Medeiros, it should promote.

“As long as the left’s actions and reactions merely reproduce this configuration of public debate in which the left defends order and the right is subversive, transgressive and insurgent, it seems to me that we will all be trapped in this paradoxical structure,” he says.

“I don’t see how the left can contribute to thinking about a post-neoliberal future that is up to the challenges of growing social inequalities, the crisis of democracy and the climate emergency if it remains stuck in this ‘left of order’ position,” he states. Medeiros.