The left must take its place and speak its name clearly, says Safatle about the 2nd round

In the presidential second round campaign, the left must “take its place and speak its name clearly”. This is the opinion of philosopher Vladimir Safatle, who reacted to the results of the first round of the presidential elections this Sunday (4) which put Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT) and Flávio Bolsonaro (PL) to define the dispute on October 25th.

In conversation with the Brazil in factSafatle stated that, until the second round, the Workers’ Party must do “the greatest political work in Brazilian history” to turn the election around. “[É um] work that will profoundly decide what this country will be like in the next ten, 15 years. Because, if Flávio Bolsonaro really wins, this will not be a four-year project”, he explains.

Between 2018 and 2022, said the philosopher, it was the institutions that blocked the advances of the extreme right in Brazil, such as the Federal Supreme Court and even Congress. But, for Safatle, “we are no longer sure of any democratic institutionality that can support a Bolsonaro government”.

“There will no longer be the containment system that the first Bolsonaro government had. When fascism returns, as we are seeing with Trump, it returns with much more strength, much more destructive force. He knows very well where the resistance camps are and he works in that direction”, he added.

When analyzing this third term of President Lula, Safatle explained that “politics went to extremes, but Brazil only has one extreme, which is the extreme right”.

“It is no longer possible for the left to play this role. The left has to take its place, it has to speak its name clearly”, he adds.

The philosopher makes an important list of the recent victories of the left in the world and specifically mentions two emblematic places: New York, with the victory of Zohran Mamdani, and the recent victory of the Die Linke party, in the city hall of Berlin, Germany.

“What do the Democratic Socialists of America teach us in New York? They presented substantive agendas, rent freezes. Never in Brazil has a left-wing city hall issued a rent freeze, and he [Mamdani] did it in New York.”