The Ultra-Political Game: Depoliticization and False Polarization in Brazil
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- Published on Thursday, 09 April 2015 23:17
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A Socialist Project e-bulletin .... No. 1104 .... April 10, 2015
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The Ultra-Political Game:
Depoliticization and False Polarization in Brazil
Sabrina Fernandes
In a recent essay, Alfredo Saad-Filho writes of the dilemmas the Workers' Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores -- PT) now faces in Brazil. His analysis helps decipher some of the dynamics that have led to the current crisis of the PT regime and President Dilma Rousseff. This essay complements Saad-Filho's contribution by further contextualizing the radical Left in relation to the PT; and by identifying where the right-wing opposition stands (beyond its relation to the failure of the PT to maintain hegemony through neoliberal conciliation). To do so, it is important to address further the demonstrations of March 13th and 15th of this year, and to draw the line between them and the events of... June 2013 through the lens of the depoliticization of Brazilian politics under the PT administration.
The image of large numbers of people taking to the streets of Brazil is not surprising since June 2013, when the country was news worldwide after focused protests against transit fare hikes grew into demonstrations by hundreds of thousands of people. Yet, the demonstrations of the past month have left many wondering about their meaning. While the Brazilian bourgeois press did its best to boycott the rally of March 13th, organized by supporters of the Workers’ Party government, it certainly left no doubt of its allegiance to the rally of March 15th, whose content was influenced (and led) by the mainstream right as well as the extreme-right. International media and political analysts, in the meantime, have tried to decipher the seemingly display of opposite forces between these two demonstrations, and some have correctly argued that the Dilma Rousseff government and the right-wing groups do not sit at polar opposites, and this polarization does not reflect ideological and political opposition, but a tactical hostility related to which political organizations should be the one to implement austerity and the further neoliberalization of Brazil's economy and society.
What remains to be said is that the reason why both camps are able to artificially position themselves as polar opposites relies on a deep process of depoliticization of Brazilian politics and the consciousness of the people. The matter of corruption, better placed as "Corruption," is a useful tool for those in the right whose objective has been to mask the foul deals between capital and the Brazilian state and to prevent any critical political analysis of this relationship. This tool, well known to Brazilian politics, has proved to be irrefutable when coupled with extreme nationalism, which has left the Workers’ Party with the task to reclaim some of the nationalism in its favour by associating itself with the defence of democracy. Corruption, democracy, and the nation are all matters worth examining carefully in Brazil, especially at this moment of economic crises. Instead, they have become jargon in the mouth of PT supporters, right-wing groups, and above all, all of those suffering from the depoliticization that is organic to ultra-politics.