AND Editorial – Defeating the Far Right by Fighting it with the Same Caliber!

We hereby share an unofficial translation of the latest Editorial by A Nova Democracia.

The news that Bolsonaro supporters are mobilizing their “truck driver leaders” to try to repeat the roadblocks of 2022, with the support of the “agro personnel,” is already circulating throughout the press, and even members of the PL party openly discuss it, wagging their tails like dogs for Bolsonaro. First, it is a threat, a blackmail, which has much narrower limits than in 2022, as today it has a defensive character in favor of Bolsonaro and will not find the support it had in 2022, when the offensive and the eventual success of the coup movement were at stake. Even so, since there is a combined interest in undermining the current government in public opinion and making it difficult for them to seek re-election in 2026, it may become viable, although it is more likely that retaliations and “malicious acts” in Congress will prosper. It is known that precautionary measures, for example, imposed by the STF against Bolsonaro – in practice, imposing a kind of house arrest with an electronic ankle bracelet and restrictions on the use of “social media” – will result in the progress of certain bills that seek to intervene in the constitutional functions of the STF (whether they will prosper or not is another question); a greater and deeper institutional crisis is where the country is heading, in a context where none of the contending forces have the political conditions to impose a solution on the others – not even the high military commands, who have been discredited as coup plotters, forced to pretend legality – dragging the situation along a long and dangerous path of uncertainties and instabilities, where the only certainty is the disorder of all kinds and in which the masses can – and must – act as an independent force and take advantage in favor of the revolutionary democratic movement.

Well, the most important factor in domestic politics today certainly revolves around the developments of Jair Bolsonaro’s trial and the related U.S. sanctions; if it is true that, over the past two years, he has substantially lost his average of active mass mobilization, it is also true that he now has much of what he needs to regain it at levels similar to those he previously achieved. This alone would be enough to demonstrate how stupid and dangerous the opportunistic thesis was, which claimed that Brazil could rid itself of Bolsonaro’s extremism through the ballot box and a series of criminal processes: nearly three years later, Bolsonaro’s electoral ratings or those of his possible successors remain the same in relative terms; if the repression against the “green chickens” initially restrained the fascist movement, after January 8, 2023, it itself justifies Bolsonaro’s rhetoric of being persecuted, as such legal movements do not change the ideology of the segments of the backward masses co-opted by extreme reaction. The only way to truly combat such a movement would be to address its roots in the manifestations, which is class-based, something neither the STF nor the electoral bourgeois “left” and its class-collaboration government are interested in, as they do not share the same class interests as the working masses, much less those of the most backward segments of these, who are harassed and polarized by Bolsonaro’s agitation.

Now, regarding the decline in Bolsonaro’s mobilizations so far, it is obvious that the moral shock to his camp contributed to a certain demoralization of the leader, who, before Minister Alexandre de Moraes, behaved like a renegade of his own dirty cause, abjuring his coup rhetoric, which he had so bravely proclaimed in public squares, thinking solely of himself above all, while the ignorant masses he sent to Brasília to cause chaos on January 8, 2023, suffer harsh penalties at the hands of the same person before whom he remained “quiet.” But the main cause of this decline is that, as has occurred since the rise of the Bolsonaro wave, given the immediacy with which the extreme right mobilizes co-opted and indoctrinated masses for a “final battle” of short duration against the “communist threat,” it only works in its known fury when the coup cause is on the offensive; outside of this situation, it recedes. And in the defensive situation, as it finds itself after the repercussions of January 8, its ranks relatively empty, only to regroup later under new favorable conditions to go on the offensive, bringing along all the byproducts of the old society’s sewage and taking with it wavering sectors of the petty bourgeoisie or the more disorganized poor masses. Brazil has not been free from this threat for a single day during this entire time, something this platform has warned about insistently. Opportunism, upon reaching the top of the old State, has taken on the administration of a regime in a state of decomposition, thus presiding over the repression against the masses and the cutting of rights. Even if it gives everything to the bankers and the “agribusiness” while offering crumbs of assistance to the impoverished masses to placate their revolt, in its effort to be the champion of bureaucratic capitalism, the dominant classes that financed its election in 2022, along with a reactionary and powerful Congress, are no longer interested in the alliance, now preferring someone of better pedigree for the position. The inevitable failure of its economic project – more of the same – and its political agenda of “identity” as the cherry on top, has only provided a platform and breath to the extreme right, especially because, in the dynamics of this decadent political system, a weak administration worn down by opposition allows the contending force that can present itself as the most opposed to the false electoral polarization to gain the most, and that is Bolsonaroism. The opportunistic government has not only governed with the liberal right and for the right but has also been a failure in combating Bolsonaroism. This is the bitter truth for opportunists and the deluded.

Now, with Donald Trump’s economic sanctions pressuring the government and pitting certain segments of the dominant classes against it on one hand, and with the government’s own demoralization due to its low approval ratings on the other, a fertile ground is created for new advances by the far right, although Bolsonaro himself is also vulnerable to demoralization, as he bets on economic chaos to secure better conditions for negotiating his personal salvation.

Fighting the far right, in fact, can only be the work of the mobilization of popular masses in class struggle, so that they themselves realize, by entering the scene independently through the construction, step by step, of the revolutionary democratic front, that the far right cannot represent them, but rather is the first to rise up to combat them. However, their mobilization cannot be general, but rather where it is possible to quickly move from the struggle for their most felt demands to combine it with the revolutionary struggle that encompasses the political interests of all impoverished masses, raising their consciousness. It is not mainly in the large cities initially, although they are important, but in the countryside, where it is possible – and where the far right is effectively combated – armed and in an armed manner; by combating the large landholdings, a stronghold of generalized reproduction of the far right, both its values and its organized anti-communist groups, the roots and fruits of fascism and extreme reaction are combated. The Agrarian Revolution – a mortal confrontation between armed and organized peasants and large landowners – is the democratic anti-fascist cause; its confrontations can and must move all the poor to take a position, either on the side of the progressive and democratic cause, or on the side of fascism and extreme reaction, and with each crushing defeat that the first imposes on the second, not by the force of arguments but by the force of the same weapons and calibers used by the fascists, only then can the mass weight of fascism be curbed, incorporating active masses into revolutionary combat, gaining the support of intermediate popular masses and neutralizing backward masses, showing them what fate awaits those who follow the fascist and reactionary serpent. This is the anti-fascist combat, the rest is “a fairy tale”.