Solon Brochado: It’s a good thing this blog doesn’t have that many readers, for I’ll present my proverbial stupidity for all to see. As promised on the last couple of posts, this would be the time where I’d post the translation of a piece by Villas-Bôas Corrêa on Lula’s Roda Viva interview. It turns out that NoMínimo, who publishes Corrêa’s work, uses dynamic links for their content. So, the link for Corrêa’s articles will always lead you to his latest column. To read past works, you have to use a drop down menu on the right.
Unfortunately, I only realized that when I was two paragraphs short of translating his latest op-ed (and now I realize this link will lead to a different article next week), dealing with Lula’s alleged condemnation of reelections. I thought of waiting to put it aside, and only post it after some more things regarding the president’s interview. But translating Corrêa’s prose is not such an easy task, and to postpone posting it would seem like the time I spent translating was wasted. So, I decided to post it and let you all know what an idiot I am. But I promise I’ll go back to the interview in upcoming posts.
The plague of reelection
One of the classical lies or ingenious fibs of daily political activity is the repetitive statement, ranging from the oath to the mere proposition by the notorious candidate that he’s no more a candidate to the most desired term in the Executive Branch niche: president of the Republic, governor or mayor.
Not even president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva escapes from this not very laudable but understandable custom. Very candidate to an encore, in 2006, in full campaign, so intense as to occupy most of his disposable time, whenever provoked in the fittings of opportunity, derails through the variant that “it hasn’t yet been decided who’ll run for reelection”. To fix the stamp of verisimilitude without the guarantee of the glue of truth, decorates the misleader with the elaborate and tortuous logic that he was always against reelections, dating back to his days as union leader, and that he’s still convinced the best solution of all is a five-year term for president as well as governor and mayor, without the pendant of reelection. Pause for breath and the conclusion: the reelection was fitted in the Constitution through iron, fire and other known resources.
You can’t debate obviousness. The way is to carry on: only in the end of the year, the first trimester of the nes, after the carnaval and the Holy Week, he’ll weigh the pros and cons to announce to the world whether he’ll try his fortune at the voting booths or will consider his life mission as accomplished. He feeds the curiosity with the ration of preliminary conditions, as the popular support granted by polls and the alliances that may offer him the best possible gurantee of a parliamentary majority.
An obvious dissimilutaion. Popularity rates miles away from the elections is a sign the candidate always interprets in his favor. And agreements between disjointed parties, with splits, dissidences and the frailty of the mess on the piggyback of interests, only shout the urgent need for political reform. Later, the elected and reelected president can gather whatever majority he desires when building the government, with full distribution of tokens, from ministries to the fat slices of the cake welded to the obese administrative machine.
If the preamble won’t go past cajoling, it opens the way for a serious debate on the reelection, tested and approved, to deserve the qualification of a plague, so damaging as its twin sisters: corruption and parliamentary comforts.
For restarters, ever since the planting of the reelection at then president Fernando Henrique’s kitchen garden, there’s no example of an executive first term titleholder who doesn’t dream with reelection, sleeping and specially with bulging eyes from ambition. The sting of the retired fly maddens the candidate even before the election, as soon asthe possibilities of victory are foreseen or haunt the illusions of those who lose their senses and fall into paranoia.
Reelection destroys terms spliced by delusions of power’s ropes. It becomes an obsession. The titleholder can’t think of anything else, he conditions all decisions throughout his term to calculations and tactical reasonings, from the most hare-brained to the vale-tudo plots, to the advantages and disadvantages of their candidate braids.
It is evident the reelection is drained. It survives thanks to the apathy of parties off the hinges and to Congress abulia.
Lula tends to look things at a glance without settling his eyes to see a picture in its clearness of traces and colors.
Right now he seems to be the last, when he should be the first to worry about the open fight for the second post in the hierarchy of power between minister Dilma Rousseff, chief of staff - former post of representative José Dirceu, a cast away looking for salvation -, and minister Antonio Palloci, the economy’s big shot. Former post of representative José Dirceu, a cast away looking for salvation.
Lula condemns the reelection.
Damn it, the body is weak and ambition clever and cunning.
