Brazilian comedian Gregório Duvivier asked the left and Brazilian civil society to watch over the president-elect this Saturday, pressing in the streets so that Lula da Silva does not forget who elected him over the far-right candidate.
“We don’t need to occupy the streets just to remove a president, but also to put pressure on him. So, the left has to understand that Lula’s victory is the victory of democracy”, but “we must continue to win it and we must continue to press and take to the streets, because Lula is already suffering pressure from many anti-democratic sectors”. with whom he has to reconcile”, said Duvivier, in an interview with Lusa, giving the example of the military or evangelical sectors.
If this pressure does not exist in the streets and in civil society, Lula da Silva “will only reconcile with those who put pressure on him, the armed forces, the financial market, the IURD [Igreja Universal do Reino de Deus] and other churches of the same ilksaid the comedian and activist.
The actor, known worldwide for the Porta dos Fundos collective and for his comedy show GregNews, once again brings his monologue “Sisyphus” (which evokes the Greek myth) to Portugal for a series of performances between December 7 and 10, with visits to Lisbon, Porto, Coimbra and Águeda.
For Duvivier, “we are going to have to follow the trail of Lula, which does not mean being a coup plotter, saying ‘we are going to overthrow his government, Lula out!'”, but that the new president “make a government for the citizens” . society, and not only for the market, the Armed Forces and the Universal Church”.
“The Brazilian Armed Forces are coup leaders, they always have been, unlike the Portuguese. They have spent the last 200 years threatening Brazilian democracy, fighting against it and several times they have succeeded, ”he warned, commenting that this structural problem is not understood outside of Brazil.
“The Portuguese sometimes do not have that dimension, because they have very different armed forces, which helped you recover democracy and participated in the 1974 Revolution and in Brazil they never participated in anything that was not an attack on democracy.” said the activist, admitting that the great challenge for the new president is “to recover the institutions that were corrupted by Bolsonaro”, such as the federal police or the environmental inspection.
In the electoral and post-election context, he considered that “if it were not for a special Supreme Court judge, Alexandre Moraes, who was the one who clashed the most and continues to clash with the coup plotters”, if it were not for him, “perhaps there would have been no Brazilian democracy”.
But Duvivier also thanked many “State officials” who resisted “Bolsonarism”, who “are heroes for many people.”
Now, it is up to Lula da Silva to do something that Brazil “did not do” in the “redemocratization of 1985”, which is to follow “the example of Portugal in 1974, which put the coup plotters to flight”, thus forcing many leaders of the Estado Novo to “flee to Brazil”.
“We didn’t have captains like Portugal” in 1974 and “no one in the army opposed the generals who keep talking and talking, challenging democracy, saying there was fraud,” he said.
Today, many soldiers “show signs that they can embark on a wave of Bolsonaro’s coup”without acknowledging the result of the elections, but Duvivier warns: “I hope that Lula really cleans up” and “holds accountable all those people who work today against the civil will of the polls.”
With his actions, Jair Bolsonaro “united the entire Brazilian democratic camp on one side” and, in these elections, “those who were attached to democracy in Brazil criticized him.”
The still president “attacked everything that is sacred in Brazil”, “democracy, science, culture, the Amazon, nature”, and added, in his opposition, “Lula and Marina [Silva, ex-ministra do Ambiente] who were fighting, or Fernando Henrique [Cardoso, ex-presidente, de direita] Y [Guilherme] Boulos”, from the extreme left, in a “unity front against the danger of fascism, with a single, fundamentalist, intolerant, racist, sexist, homophobic thought”, he explained.
And for this reason, in Brazil, “our democratic right is our revolutionary left” in opposition to Bolsonaro, Duvivier commented.
In this sense, “Brazilian democracy is perhaps strengthened in the sense that it is united and we saw that we are the majority” in the elections, he stressed, considering that the presidential election “was a plebiscite” to the democratic process.
Lula da Silva’s victory “was the victory of democracy, which in this second round had on one side the detractor of democracy, who always said that the dictatorship should have killed more people, called the 1964 coup a revolution, that is, , is a detractor of democratic institutions and the other is a subject that was born from redemocratization”.
Regarding the president-elect, Lula da Silva’s political life “was born in the fight against the dictatorship and that, even when he was unjustly detained, he respected the institutions, even when they were an unfair political condemnation,” said the humorist, commenting on the conviction of the leader of the Workers’ Party on corruption charges, a decision that was later reversed.
“With all the criticism he has, Lula is a democrat, with a lot of attachment to democracy, a lot of respect for democratic institutions,” he considered, praising the Brazilian people: “We chose democracy and we show that we are very attached to this institution.”
Now, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva needs to promote dialogue, with “a more transparent communication with the people so that the people understand that democracy cannot be won and that you have to fight for it every day.”
“Democracy is not something that can be conquered, period, because politically nothing can be conquered forever,” Duvivier stressed, recalling that the democratic process “is not a binary system.”
Democracy is “a spectrum that you can go up and down all the time,” he considered. “Brazil, for example, was a democracy, but it was a little less so with the absurd ‘impeachment’ of 2016” and “we lost many points on this democratic scale.”
For this reason, Lula da Silva must “make people understand that democracy is still at risk, even with him elected, and he needs to call on the population to defend it, which means occupying the streets, many times,” he insisted.
Source: Observadora
