The June that didn’t end – 03/06/2023 – Politics

I liked to imagine that the future would come to Brazil. That promise made in 1941 by the Austrian Stefan Zweig, inspired by the ideas of Gilberto Freyre, Roberto Simonsen and Sérgio Buarque. We would be a world power, according to the book “Brazil, the Country of the Future”, in which Zweig bet on some assets that seemed solid: absence of conflicts on our borders, internal problems easy to reconcile, natural riches, a multicolored people, linguistic unity and territorial. There was no way it wouldn’t work out.

We can look at all our ills, which outnumber our assets, and be clear that Brazil doesn’t have the slightest chance of succeeding. Or we can play optimistic futurism, blame the June 2013 demonstrations, and imagine that the future would have arrived if not for 20 cents.

Dilma would have, as indeed happened, ended her term with low popularity. Perhaps there would have been no black blocs, the cry for reforms, the revolt against corruption and the awakening of the extreme right, but believing in a miracle in the economy would be too optimistic.

Brazil would be in recession, but still with the enthusiasm of someone who would host a World Cup and an Olympics. Perhaps Zweig was finally right. It almost went to Plano Real. With Lula 1 the future was almost in the present. Who knows now.

The Cup is ours, with a Brazilian no one can. We would never know what collective depression or a 7 to 1 meme album is. Marina Silva would be the first black woman, northerner and environmental activist elected president. The country, in short, the great protagonist of the global environmental agenda, the breeding ground for the biggest ecological startups, home of big techs with a green seal.

It was never the 20 cents. Even if everything was different, everything would be exactly the same.

If it wasn’t June 2013, maybe it would be the next year or two. Our future is doomed to failure because our assets are fragile in the face of our destructive power as a society. Had it not been for June 2013, even if Dilma had not been impeached, the major parties such as PT and PSDB were already out of breath and the political crisis fed the illusory narrative of renewal, in addition to nurturing the gestation of a reactionary right.

But without the impeachment, without the few reforms, without the bitter medicine called Michel Temer, Brazil would be Argentina today.

It was never the 20 cents, it was never about corruption, nor about more transparency in politics or a more efficient state. It’s about a future that will never come. If it weren’t for Jair Bolsonaro, it would be any other offspring of the dictatorship that shamelessly flirts with authoritarianism and truculence, while saying amen.

It’s about the inequality that feeds a country for a few, while a few others observe from the Central Plateau many others who only survive while politicians are concerned with “little flour, my mush first” and producing memes to go viral.

What would Zweig say today when seeing the only possible future for Brazil? It is not June 2013’s fault that we are a multicolored people who do not accept our own miscegenation and who perpetuate precisely the racism that prevents us from growing as an economic power and from establishing ourselves as a democracy. Would Zweig see any future in a country that cuts down its forests and leaves its native peoples to starve?

We are at the top of the list of those who most kill LGBTQIA+ people, we are ranked in the ranking of violence against women, of rape of vulnerable people. And without June 2013 the numbers would be even more tragic.

Since then, we’ve become less passive, we’ve taken a liking to clashing, we’ve switched from football to politics, we’ve cut ties with family members, we’ve become intolerant of intolerance. Without June 2013 we would be trapped in that past of the illusion of the cordial Brazilian. The future has not arrived, but our present is the face of our past.

Zweig and his wife were found dead in the house where they lived, in Petrópolis, shortly after Carnival in 1942. The reason for the suicide would be a mixture of personal desolation and disbelief in humanity. Every Carnival has an end, what never ended was June 2013.