Brazil’s Rousseff Re-elected Despite Anti-Workers’ Party Sentiment: What Now?
Brazil’s Rousseff Re-elected Despite Anti-Workers’ Party Sentiment: What Now?
Written by Sabrina Fernandes
Monday, 27 October 2014 12:59
The last polls before the second round of Brazilian elections indicated a victory for Dilma Rousseff of the Workers’ Party (PT), with Aécio Neves, from the centre-right PSDB, trailing closely behind. This was within the reported margin of error and Sunday’s results could not be confidently predicted until the official announcement of Rousseff’s re-election. This is the tightest presidential race for the Workers’ Party in 12 years and the reasons for this are varied and relate both to the reality of Brazilian politics post-June 2013 and the impact of 12 years of PT government on the imaginary of the Brazilian people.
Rousseff is not the only one to take on many challenges as the president of Brazil for the next four years. The PT needs to decide where it stands both as political party and as government leadership. The radical Left parties and social movements need to organize as opposition in ways that promote immediate gains as well as long-term ones. Finally, the problem of depoliticization needs to be taken seriously by all of these actors if the country is to avoid another close encounter with an openly neoliberal and conservative alternative in four years.
The meaning of four more years with Rousseff
Without the advantage of a comfortable victory, Rousseff needs to first and foremost identify ways for reconciling the opposing groups that went head to head during the heated second-round. Such a move would involve reducing the disturbing reactions of the losing side, which have involved racist and xenophobic comments, and the anti-dialogical position promoted by the mainstream media’s blunt support of Neves. Rousseff’s victory speech attended to these aspects by focusing on dialogue, hope, and political maturity. She stressed that she does not believe the elections have split the country in half, although it is evident that she will have to deal with the impacts of the heated polarization of the past months throughout the next four years; calls for consensus will not be enough. Rousseff will also be dealing with a very conservative Congress, which may pose challenges for her campaign promises to expand social rights through inclusion and listen to social movements and popular demands.
She will also be dealing with an energetic opposition from the Left, mainly radical leftist parties, organizations, and movements that believe Rousseff and PT can no longer claim to represent the Left and that Rousseff’s re-election is only a victory insofar as it meant Neves’ defeat. In fact, the socialist political parties PSTU and PCB urged the population to annul their votes given the very few differences between Rousseff and Neves’ political projects and the years of disappointing neoliberal and harmful neo-developmentalist policies on behalf of the PT. The PSOL oriented the 1.6 million people who voted for their presidential candidate Luciana Genro to freely choose between Rousseff and annulling their votes, as long as no vote would go to Neves. In many ways, any support for Rousseff coming from the radical Left was accompanied by explicit critique of the PT and framed as a direct veto to Neves and his policies, which culminated in the campaign pun “Aécio Never.” PSOL’s national veto position and the direct engagement by some of its public figures in support of Rousseff may have actually contributed to some of the votes that decided the presidential race.
More:
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/brazil-archives-63/5101-brazils-rousseff-re-elected-despite-anti-workers-party-sentiment-what-now
