Ultra-pragmatic Quaquaism is still a minority in the PT – 02/18/2023 – Celso Rocha de Barros

Last week, deputy Washington Quaquá (PT-RJ) allowed himself to be photographed alongside Eduardo Pazuello (PL-RJ), one of Jair Bolsonaro’s main accomplices in the murder of at least 100,000 Brazilians during the Covid-19 pandemic. 19.

After the negative repercussions, PT president, deputy Gleisi Hoffmann, took to social media to condemn the attitude. “In life, as in politics, there are limits to everything,” Hoffmann said.

Quaqua has a funny name, but it shouldn’t be underestimated as a leader. Apparently, he was a good mayor in Maricá, in Rio de Janeiro, where there is a basic income program with international repercussions.

However, Quaquá is also famous for a willingness to make alliances that far exceeds that of the average PT and even the moderate PT.

In 2020, Quaquá articulated PT support for Waguinho, candidate for mayor of Belford Roxo, in the state of Rio, who supported Bolsonaro. Two years later, Waguinho was the only mayor of Baixada Fluminense to support Lula in the second round.

It was such rare support that it earned him the right to appoint his wife, deputy Daniela do Waguinho, to the Ministry of Tourism. Quaqua won the round.

However, apart from elections in which the opponent is fascism, these movements still bother the vast majority of PT members. Quaquaism, an ultra-pragmatic turn bordering on ideological dissolution, is still a minority in the PT.

The party has made numerous alliances with the right, mostly to secure legislative majorities.

However, it still maintains a clearer ideological identity than that of most parties: for example, it has a much greater willingness than other major parties to survive in opposition –that is, without access to positions and funds— when it loses elections.

Last week, the podcast Dor de Coluna, by economist Pedro Faria, discussed my hypothesis about the risk of the PT becoming a new PMDB. Faria considers that part of the PT would accept becoming a great MDB of the left, but the obstacle to this process would be on the right.

It would no longer organize itself as a modernizing project, as during the hegemony of the PSDB; the displacement of economic power to agribusiness, or to what Mathias Alencastro called “The Mega-Center-West”, would reinforce the reactionary character of the right.

With the depletion of the center-right, the PT lacked the allies that would allow it to convert definitively to the center.

In the end, if Faria allows me to illustrate his point, the right would continue to look like Pazuello, who would shoot Quaquá at the first opportunity.

This scenario is possible, as is the dissolution of the PT’s ideological identity.

But there is a third possible scenario, which I am rooting for and to which I attribute reasonable probability: the PT and its allies could form a new progressive consensus, symbolized, for example, by the two tax reforms the government is planning: one that should increase economic efficiency , another that should, for the first time in Brazilian history, use the tax authorities against inequality.

In this scenario, Quaquá would escape becoming a concept name, would escape being shot by Pazuello and would continue to have the chance of being a member of a reasonably consistent center-left party. He and all of us would win.

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