With the image of President Lula at the May Day rally in front of an empty square, according to political scientists Brazil entered a new season of its civil participation in which the masses are moving from the real square to the virtual one, more extremist and polarized, with obvious dangers for the democratic quality of political debate. However, we are talking about the same Latin American giant that “woke up” in the 2013 demonstrations, as even the slogans shouted in the streets. But that was a different time. It was the beginning of the second decade of the millennium, and the fuse that lit more than 50 cities across the country in June of that year from San Pablo was a minimal increase in public transportation fares. Behind, however, there was a much deeper discomfort.
The Brazilian population, which for the first time since the end of the military regime took to the streets en masse – even the elderly and children marched for kilometers – clamored for a better and, above all, less corrupt politics and for a Brazil with a more balanced distribution. fair income. It all took place on the eve of 2014 Soccer World Cup, which instead led to the construction of cathedrals in the desert and unleashed a vast exercise of corruption among the political class of the time. With the masses in the streets supporting the judges of the Lava Jato anti-corruption operation, the wave of demonstrations ended in 2016 with the dismissal of the then president Dilma Rousseff. Brazilians had demonstrated above all to themselves, as well as to the world, the great power of their demonstrations that had even achieved political change. However, With the assault on the palaces of power on January 8, 2023, that spell was broken.
Almost a decade later, Lula’s empty square in San Pabloin the parking lot of the old Itaquera stadium, today Neo Química Arena on the symbolic day of the Workers Daywas a hard awakening not only for the Workers’ Party, the president’s PT, but for all of Brazil. The Union Union Force He expected at least 50,000 people, but in reality just under 1,700 attended, according to data from the Political Debate Observatory of the University of São Paulo, USP. As the journalist commented Mario Sabino on the news site MetropolesLula’s demonstration “It was a legal offense, a political fiasco and an immoral act”. The event had been organized by the country’s main unions, but financed with public funds from the so-called Rouanet Entertainment Law, under the sponsorship of the national oil company Petrobras and the Industry’s Social Service Council, SESI. In a Kafkaesque crescendo, Lula, who did not expect the square to be empty, blamed the event organizers during her speech for not publicizing it well. In particular, she cited Márcio Macedo, head of the General Secretariat of the Presidency. “You know that yesterday I spoke with him about this event and I told him: Oh Márcio, this event is poorly organized. The event is poorly convened. We didn’t make the effort to bring the amount of people we needed to bring. However, I am used to talking to a thousand, a million people, but also, if necessary, I only talk to the wonderful lady who is here in front of me,” Lula declared.
“It has nothing to do with the organization, but with the difficulty of talking to the bases“, he explained to the newspaper Folha de São Paulo Andréia Galvão, political scientist at the State University of Campinas. “Workers have become more refractory to organization and collective action, they are further removed from the union and are betting much more on the ability to find individual solutions, or social movements organized around other entities, in addition to the support offered by the churches and the family itself,” said Galvão. Furthermore, for the first time in the history of all the PT governments of the union centers that organized the event, at least five have publicly criticized and accused Lula since the beginning of his third term, especially with regard to agrarian reform and at the minimum wage.
Instead of taking note of the crisis that that empty square represented, the Brazilian president tried to capitalize on it politically, even breaking the electoral law.. In the context of Workers’ Day, Lula explicitly asked for the vote to Guilherme Boulos, of the Socialism and Freedom Party (PSOL), the candidate supported by him and the PT in the October municipal elections. Referring to himself, the Brazilian president said that “no one will beat this guy here if you vote for Boulos for mayor of São Paulo in the next elections. And I am going to make an appeal: every person who voted for Lula, in 1989, 1994, 1998, 2006, 2010 and 2022, must vote for Boulos as mayor of São Paulo,” declared the Brazilian president. In response, the Brazilian Democratic Movement (MDB), of the current mayor Ricardo Nunes, who will run again, the Novo, of the pre-candidate Marina Helena, and the Brazilian Social Democratic Party (PSDB) appealed to electoral justice. In addition to risking a fine of up to 25,000 reais ($4,930) and a complaint that could even lead to the rejection of Boulos’ candidacy, “the most worrying thing is how out of touch with reality Lula is, without understanding that the world has changed and Brazil, the political balance, the union centers, the disposition of the masses, the PT and Lula himself have changed,” writes Eliane Cantanhêde in the newspaper The State of São Paulowhich concludes by saying that “the time when millions of people mobilized has passed.”
About ten days earlier, in Rio de Janeiro, a demonstration called by the former president Jair Bolsonaro had filled the square, but the dynamic was basically the same as that of Lula in São Paulo, that is, that of transforming the protesters from protagonists of political dialogue into passive recipients. The protesters who protest and make things change have become participants in a ritual that has gone from being political to being almost hypnotic or religious. At the Rio de Janeiro demonstration, Bolsonaro’s wife, Michelle BolsonaroAfter taking the microphone, he even began to recite the Lord’s Prayer along with some 45,000 protesters in an unprecedented mix of politics and religion. As if that were not enough, the neo-Pentecostal pastor Silas Malafaia, one of the main organizers and financiers of the pro-Bolsonaro demonstrations, was also given the floor, who spoke vehemently about politics, using the incisive pauses and times of evangelical preaching and transforming the act in a collective ritual in which emotion prevailed over everything, even politics. This is also confirmed by the symbols used in these events, which in fact are foreign to them, which decontextualizes them even more from reality and often shows the schizophrenic contradictions of these concentrations.n If in the May Day celebrations in San Pablo Street vendors circulated offering flags and T-shirts with the symbols of Hamas and Hezbollah for a few reais, in Rio there were plenty of those from Israel. But that did not stop Carlos Bolsonaro from publishing on his social networks a photo of himself in Berlin with Beatrix von Storch, granddaughter of Nazi Finance Minister Lutz Graf Schwerin von Krosig, on April 30. Storch is the leader of the far-right party Alternative for Germany (AfD) and she was received in Brazil by President Bolsonaro in 2021.
Thus, if in Brazil the demonstrations are becoming a kind of temple for a collective ritual celebrated by the politician in power, regardless of how many and how they really listen to him, political scientists sound the alarm in view of the next electoral campaign and They wonder where citizen-voters are migrating to make their voices heard, to communicate with politics, and when it is necessary to put pressure on them. The experts do not doubt it, from the real agora we are moving to the Internet bubble where although it is true that the police do not shoot – as happened in the street demonstrations of 2013 in which a photographer lost an eye – you can still get out very damaged. According to a recent analysis by the non-governmental organization Global Project Against Hate and Extremism (GPAHE), there are more than 20 active and organized extremist groups in Brazil, and most of them spread hate speech on the Internet. The study also cites the Conservative-Liberal Institute, founded by federal deputy Eduardo Bolsonaro, son of the former president, for its misogynistic content and religious fundamentalism, and the Liberal Party (PL) as a promoter of LGBTphobic and hate speeches against women. There is also no shortage of extremist groups that exalt racism, such as Falange de Acero, a white nationalist group that defends the separation of the South from the rest of the country and publishes racist and xenophobic messages against Northeasterners. Other separatist groups, such as Resistencia Sur, claim to be against “global hegemonic liberalism in all its forms, both left and right.” The Brazilian version of the Italian neo-fascist group Forza Nuova also exists on the Internet. One of its founders, Roberto Fiore, was convicted by the Italian justice system for the crime of subversive association and armed gang in 1985. Brazil also has to worry on the left-wing extremist front. Anti-Semitism and radical neo-Marxism are growing on social networks, causing a polarization of the debate that will only increase in the face of the municipal election campaign in October. The result is that the virtual square is less and less a square with clear and differentiated ideologies and more and more a meeting place of what in 2020 Christopher Way, the then director of the US FBI, called “salad bar ideology”, that is a confusing mix of hybrid ideologies that absorbs a bit of everything, from the right and the left, with the aim of actually opposing democratic thought.
