PTB tries to be reborn on the left and away from Roberto Jefferson – 12/04/2023 – Power

PTB is back. Or, at least, trying to be reborn. Less than a month after the end of the party, due to the merger with Patriota, the party is in the process of being recreated. This time, sheltering Brizolistas who defend that the acronym returns to its origins when it was home to former presidents Getúlio Vargas and João Goulart and Leonel Brizola, former governor of Rio de Janeiro and Rio Grande do Sul.

The acronym was, until recently, led by former right-wing deputy Roberto Jefferson, imprisoned since October 2022, when he shot and threw grenades at federal police officers who arrived to carry out an operation at his home.

The PTB also housed allies of former president Jair Bolsonaro (PL), such as retired police officer Fabrício Queiroz and former deputy Daniel Silveira.

Now, the party must radically change sides, turning left.

This Friday (1st), the TSE (Superior Electoral Court) gave approval for brizolistas to start collecting signatures to recreate the PTB. The acronym is already on the court’s list as a party in formation and will need to collect, within a period of two years, 500 thousand signatures.

The acronym became vacant after the PTB merged with Patriotas, thus creating the PRD (Democratic Renewal Party). The merger, authorized earlier this month by the TSE, was the way the parties found to try to survive the barrier clause.

Neither of them performed well enough in the election to the Chamber of Deputies to guarantee access to party and electoral funds and, therefore, they decided to unite.

The person leading the re-creation of the acronym is the former constituent deputy Vivaldo Barbosa, who was Brizola’s Secretary of Justice during his first term in the Rio de Janeiro Executive, in 1983. According to the Brizolista, the idea is to make the PTB once again a labor party.

“We are already a party registered at the registry office, the acronym is ours. Only we can use the PTB”, said Barbosa, who will be the party’s president. “Let’s get real labor back.”

The PTB was founded in 1945, by Getúlio Vargas, and extinguished during the military dictatorship. With the end of the undemocratic regime, the party was refounded in 1980 by Ivete Vargas, great-niece of the former president.

She fought a legal battle with Brizola for command of the acronym. At the time, the TSE gave Ivete a win because it understood that she registered the creation of the party before the gaucho party. In response, the Brizolista leader even cried in front of the cameras and tore up a sheet of paper with PTB written on it.

Under Ivete’s command, she aligned the party with the PDS, an acronym inherited from Arena and linked to the military. It was there that the party took a turn to the right and became home to Roberto Jefferson, who was elected to the Chamber for the first time in 1983 while already a member of the PTB.

In 2020, under Jefferson’s presidency, the party changed the colors of its flag, leaving behind red, white and black, to take on green and yellow — a reference to the ideological alignment with Bolsonaro. He also began to adopt the motto “God, Family, Country and Freedom”.

Now, with the process of recreating the party, there is a new statute for the PTB. The document defines that the acronym will return to its symbol in the original colors, divided into three vertical stripes with the name of the party written in the middle.

The statute also establishes that the new PTB will “be inspired by the principles of democracy, nationalism, laborism and socialism and the practice of the Republic”.

The new PTB directory must also try to maintain the party’s number on the ballot, 14. This definition, however, will only be made after the party obtains all the necessary signatures.

“It’s still not possible to define it, only after the signatures. It’s likely [manter o 14]”, Barbosa told Sheet.

According to the brizolista, the new PTB has representation in 20 states and has already started the work of collecting signatures.

“We only need Roraima, Rondônia, Mato Grosso, Mato Grosso do Sul, Pará and Sergipe. In these states, we need to establish commissions”, he said. “We are going to expand our organization, cover all states and dive into the political discussion”.