Brazil, the giant of South America, is experiencing a strange paradox: since Lula came to power, all indices have improved, from economic to recognition of the country’s weight abroad. However, everyone seems dissatisfied or uncomfortable: rich and poor, workers and intellectuals, right and left. And Lula loses popularity.
There are those who ironically say that the country would need to go through a period of psychoanalysis to understand the paradox that anguishes it. And the first to be surprised, without hiding it, is Lula himself, who came to power for the third time, this time with the arduous mission of freeing the country from the weight of a Bolsonaro extreme right that was suffocating it to the brink of a new coup.
The Government is inundated with reasons that could explain this social unrest when it should be celebrating a kind of national resurrection. And Lula is the first, and rightly so, to feel disconcerted. He fails to understand that, despite this time having created a center-left Government and having agreed in Congress even with Bolsonaro parties to get some of his projects approved, his hands are tied and in conflict with two categories that were in the past its field of glory: the working class and the arrival to the university of the great world of the poor with the creation of scholarships.
As for the professors at the federal universities who were in the previous leftist governments, Lula, incredulous, today finds headlines in national newspapers such as: The teachers’ strike already reaches 38 universities. Everyone asks for a salary increase. General discontent is spreading, which continues to worry the Executive.
And there is no less discontent in the class of manual labor, that of the factories, where Lula grew up as a young man and became the undisputed leader of the union movements that ended up being a privileged category. Today, the mythical uneducated unionist who created perhaps the largest union movement in the Western world, appears disoriented when he realizes that those millions of workers who had placed all their hopes in him no longer seem to support his old strategies.
The last example was last May 1, a mythical date in which the left en bloc gathered every year around Lula a gigantic demonstration of workers. This year, the first person surprised by the low participation rate of workers in São Paulo was Lula, who attributed it to the fact that the event “had been poorly organized.” The extreme right immediately took advantage of the fact that Bolsonaro, despite being out of the political game and banned from participating in elections for eight years, had just gathered an unexpected crowd in São Paulo. The Bolsonaro social networks immediately took advantage of it to announce that “a Bolsonaro doll brings more people to the streets than Lula.”
It will take more time to understand this antinomy of Brazil that, on the one hand, improves in all indices of development and international prestige, and remains trapped in discontent and discouragement that ranges from factories to universities. For the moment, the first explanations offered by political analysts and social psychology gurus refer to the fact that the traditional left, which fundamentally supports Lula in his third term, has not yet assimilated that new technologies are revolutionizing the world. from work.
If yesterday having a permanent contract in a factory, with all social and union rights, was a privilege, today that is changing.
Today, young people in manual labor and the intellectuals themselves in universities are looking for other paths. They are less interested in permanent jobs that they consider a corset and look for more flexible forms, more in line with the possibilities offered by new technologies. They no longer want to be employees, although privileged, but rather protagonists of their own work.
One of the most striking examples that is surprising Lula in this field of work is that the new categories of jobs, from the millions of home delivery workers, are reluctant to enter the lanes of the old unionized companies. They want new types of organization, new methods of social security, in a word, they prefer to be free although insecure and feel like owners of new types of work organization.
It is not easy for Lula, the undisputed leader of the great metalworkers’ strikes of the past, to understand this Copernican change that the world of work is going through in the era of new technologies.
To Lula, who never lacked political sense and ended up triumphing in his two previous governments, someone will have to explain to him that the world has changed in a short time, that Brazil is connected, in good and bad ways, to the world of new technologies. and that in this, surely, there is no turning back.
Today a president cannot boast of not having a mobile phone and having to use his wife’s, or continue to believe that the networks can continue attracting, as in the past, to his inflamed rallies in favor of the poorest or the factory workers. All of this is ignoring the fact that in this digital world, sometimes a simple irony, whether intelligent or crude, like the idea that a Bolsonaro doll brings more people to the streets than the mythical former union leader, can be sad and even embarrassing. Lula’s advisors, who sometimes seem rather trapped in a time that no longer exists, should not ignore.
In times of intriguing artificial intelligence, the danger of being tied to the old political and social clichés that were once a victory for the working class, is real and probably unstoppable. What Brazil and those who do not give up wanting to understand that the world is in labor pains, still unable to digest that yesterday is already gone and today we are building with pain and sometimes with horror, is to bet without fear on novelty and Do not forget that, thanks to these new horizons that are beginning to be glimpsed, young people disillusioned by the old politicians may be able to produce new crops of hope.
Subscribe here to newsletter from EL PAÍS América and receive all the key information on current events in the region
Subscribe to continue reading
Read without limits
_
#happening #Brazil #improves #happy
