We cannot deceive ourselves or conform. Brazil is a country with serious structural problems and cyclical challenges that need to be faced. There is enormous inequality of income and opportunities. Where there is a lack of water, energy, gas, and urban violence, traffic and pollution. Public education systems cannot cope with demand.
I admit that it is difficult to see the glass as half full on some issues.
We are not generating responses capable of stopping the expansion and institutionalization of organized crime. Another example: even to reestablish the credibility of the Judiciary, it is imperative to accelerate the responsible resumption of the anti-corruption agenda.
But I would like to make a provocation here, leaving a less negative view of reality and the future.
Firstly, because discouragement does not do justice to the majority of our population, who are hopeful and strive to build a better future.
Secondly, because pessimism is one step away from prostration, and this only interests those who do not want things to improve.
Third, those who get used to seeing the glass as half empty stop seeing the whole glass. Hence jumping to hasty, biased and inconsistent conclusions is a gamble.
Let’s take politics as an example, more specifically which are still fresh in the collective memory.
For much of the year, the dark and fatalistic narrative prevailed according to which the election would be the scene of a battle of rejections and the apogee of the negative vote, the “against” vote. And yet, the polls showed otherwise.
There was a historic record of mayors re-elected — of those who tried, more than 80% succeeded. Some will say that the parliamentary amendments increased the “cost of entry” into the dispute, hindering the renewal. But this was the most successful election for political oxygenation movements like RenovaBR. What about “anti-system” extremists? Almost everyone succumbed.
It was also said that the Lula vs. Bolsonaro was irrevocably entrenched in Brazilian society and that it would guide the results of the elections. Again they forgot to coordinate with the voters.
Not even occupying the Presidency did the left manage to grow. And the right, which succeeded, left the polls less dependent on Bolsonaro, confirming that anti-PTism is strong, but explaining that it has no owner.
Someone might ask to point out that the parties that challenged both poles and orbited around an alternative (the “third way”) in previous elections also did badly this year.
In fact, if we consider the largest cities (with more than 200 thousand voters), all these parties decreased — from the PSDB to the PDT, from the PSB to the MDB inclusive. But their votes went mostly to pendulum acronyms, with no umbilical connection to either pole. These pendulum acronyms have never been so strong. The conditions for an independent flight are more than given.
So that we don’t just focus on politics, let’s take the climate issue and the environmental disasters that afflicted the country this year, from the Pantanal fires.
Someone may regret the clear lack of preparation and/or inaction of public authorities to deal with these tragedies. But isn’t it opportune to remember that it was on Brazil’s initiative that the world’s largest climate conference will take place, for the first time, on Brazilian soil? And in
Someone will point out that the federal government does not have a strategic plan to lead to this, that it hesitates to do the necessary homework, that it remains hostage to the dilemma of whether or not to explore fossil fuel reserves, that it gets lost looking in the rear view mirror instead to look at what the windshield is showing.
On the other hand, civil society as a whole is responding accordingly. Business leaders, in an unprecedented gesture, offered to help. Aware of the risks of a water crisis, agribusiness sat at the table to build solutions. The energy transition debate has gained traction.
We have never mobilized so much technology in the service of environmental monitoring. And Brazilians who are a reference on the topic have been traveling the country and the world issuing consequential warnings. Progress: denialism has withered, and almost no one refutes the importance of this issue anymore.
To those who, correctly, complain about the dollar and high interest rates, isn’t it worth a historical contextualization?
In previous confidence crises, the speculative attack on the real came from abroad. Not this time. Just as the problem was born here in the country, the solution is in our hands.
Even the stones know that, for the market to calm down, Planalto just needs to make a change and sign a commitment to fiscal responsibility. The ministers have already given the password for this. They deserve recognition and support.
In fact, for eight years and three different administrations, the economic teams have left a virtuous and transformative legacy.
The labor reform helped us see today, at the same time, a record number of formal jobs and a dynamic movement in the entrepreneurial economy. Imagine the cash flow gap if the Social Security reform had not been approved.
Tax reform is coming to simplify and make tax collection fairer. And we had the largest financial inclusion program in the world — and, I suspect, the largest income redistribution program in the country since Bolsa Família, by exempting millions of Brazilians from bank fees.
How can we lose sight of these and so many other advances? And how can you not be inspired by them to advance even further? Does it make sense to talk bad all the time? In Brazil, nonconformism is constructive and optimistic.
