Comments on the first round of Brazilian elections.

[Carlos Eduardo Rebello <crebello@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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Dear comrades of Marxlist: Here are my more detailed reflections (with some
personal remarks) on the 1st. round (Ex Ante the French-style _Ballotage_
beyween presidential and gubernatorial candidates that failed to win at least
50% of valid ballots, blank and nullifies ballots not included) of the
Brazilian elections:

1-Rates of presence were generally high (abstentions were officially at
something like 17%), far higher than during 1998, when Cardoso was re-elected
in regal fashion after making an ad hoc constitutional amendment instituting
reelection (something aberrant to all Latan American constitutional tradition,
which favors larger terms of office with _no_ reelection, for causes anyone
conversant with the history of the 1910 Mexican Revolution will understand) as
a part of the neoliberal project of keeping reliable rulers in office for as
much as possible, viz. Menem, Fujimori and the like. Since rates of
abstentions includes voters deceased in-between elections, who are stricken
the roll only afrter three no-show successive elections, one may not know for
sure how many people were actually absent, only that it was a far lesser rate
than in 1998. Blank and Nullified votes (mostly illiterate voters who had
problems if the electronic voting machines) were a mere 10%.
  
2.Since one had to vote for 6 office-holders (federal and state
representatives, state governor, teo-tiers of the Federal Senate, and
President) queues were long and tiresome. Problems with direct, crude frauding
-as in 1994, when one had to vote twice in Rio de Janeiro for legislative
offices, the entire voting being annulled by decision of the highest electoral
court -absent.Hwever, there's still the problem with the non-transparency of
the information concerning voting softwares and the practical inability to
recount votes. Vote purchase and clientelistic arrangments, of course, were
business as usual.

3. As to the actual election, I admit that I voted for Lula, regardless of my
idea of voting for the entire ticket of the PSTU/Socialist Unified Workers
Party (for which I voted in federal and state legislators, governor, and one
senator). The fact is that the Brazilian political Center - the entrenched
bourgeois oligarch of which Cardoso is the -upstart - leader, is obviouly
under the srain of a prolonged crisis - that is, a whole decade of a
stagnating economy due to the usual IMF-sponsored oppressive fiscal crunch,
cuts of public services and stranglehold paying of external and internal
debts. In this juncture, Lula, notwithstanding his increasingly pink stance,
his unsavory political allies, his (and his party) muddled (or better absent?)
ideology, have come to be seem as representing a break with existing
conditions by some 46% of the electorate, and their defeat would make nothing
to raise the degree of Left consciousness of the electorate; it would only
increase political despair. As Trotsky said to his followers after Chiang
Kai-Sheck butchered the Chinese Communists in 1927 (something LDB's friends
thought would demoralize Stalin, who had sponsored the entry of the CCP in the
Kuomintang) defeat is not a means of raising political consciousness.

3-For fact is, the general stress on the Brazilian Center has not failed to
generate overtly reactionary responses (not to speak of the covertly
Bonapartist project of Mangabeira Unger's pupil Cyro Gomes): on one hand, the
appearance of the Extreme Right, fascistoid-of-the-Poujade-Le Pen variety
Party for the Reestructuiring of National Order, whose leader, the
charicatural heart specialist Eneas has profited from the dislocation of the
rightist petit-bourgeois vote of the conservative middle class of the State of
São Paulo from the increasingly bad reputation (and the suspected Channel
Islands secret account) of the old political heir of military dictatorship
Paulo Maluf. Eneas has received, in the single State of São Paulo, _more than
1.5 MILLION ballots, enough to elect 5 other Congresspersons on the wake of
his voting (remember that Congressional voting in Brazil is proportional and
open-listed).

4-On the other hand, there's also the Right populism that supports itself on
the enormous and increasingly urban Brazilian lumpen, especially here in Rio,
a former administartive center ever discriminated in the handling of federal
handouts aand with an ever fickle lumpen engaged in constant rioting under the
control of the drug war lords - who, of course, are but retail sellers
financed by higher powers. Clientelism aimed at such lumpen form the basis of
the ever incresingly racketeering of the Pentecostal churches, who had in this
last election enough clout to elect a shadowy figure as senator for Rio de
Janeiro, said figure being a front to the head of the extortionate racket who
goes under the name of Universal Church for the Kingdom of God (in the process
defeating humilliatingly - and sadly- old nationalist Leonel Brizola, who ran
for the Senate, and for whom I voted). Also, such "evangelical" vote form the
basis of the electorate of the former Rio governor and presidential candidate
Anthony "Garotinho" ("Kiddie") Matheus, who has manegad to elect as governor
his wife Rosinha ("Rosie"), a kind of Evita devoid of any progressive feature.

5-Since Cyro Gomes and Garotinho have already given their suppoort for Lula, I
believe that in 27th october he shall, putting into a nutshell, receive,
willingly or not, a mandate _against_ IMF orthodox, the FTAA, and the handing
out of a Brazilians-keep-out American base in Northern Brazil - against said
issues the PSTU having mustered an spontaneous and informal poll that
attracted nothing less than 10 MILLION ballots - the same as the entire vote
of Cyro Gomes.

The rest, is the willingly reactionary ingnorance of the bourgeois press of
Brazil and the Imperialist Countries.

That's that. I have spoken

CARLOS REBELLO 


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