The upcoming presidential elections will be decided by about 10% of voters, who do not identify with the Lulist or Boconist political field. Half of this non -compromised contingent is composed of the so -called microentrepreneurs.
In 2022, they voted for the petista candidate 52% of them. Now approve your government no more than 45%. The data are from researcher Felipe Nunes, director of Quaest and teacher of the Getúlio Vargas Foundation. If other reasons were not, it would be enough to demand that it is understood what drives such a group of workers, occupants of just under the half of the informal market, estimated in 2023 by 38.7% of the workforce.
There are controversies about who these citizens are. Certainly the informal self -employment – street vendors; hairdressers; masons; taxi drivers etc.—; Small business owners without CNPJ; and individual microentrepreneurs formalized by a 2008 law. Disputes surround digital platform workers – application driver; food delivery; and other specialized professionals – whose autonomy to undertake is contested by many scholars.
If entrepreneurship is a recent denomination, the phenomenon is much older; Dating back to the CLT (Consolidation of Labor Laws), promulgated in 1943 – therefore, therefore, neoliberal policies. Unable to encompass the whole of workers, Octogenarian CLT ended up segmenting them among formal market participants, and those who did not benefit from them and composed the informal sector. Over time and in the taste of the economic conjuncture, it housed between 40% and 60% of employed workers.
The first government document to speak of entrepreneurship was a study by the Presidency’s Strategic Affairs Secretariat in the management of Roberto Mangabeira Unger (2007-09). The Harvard philosopher and teacher – acute intelligence only loses to his scarce practical political sense – was also the first to draw attention to the subjective revolution, in the plane of collective consciousness, brought by those who called “poor struggling”; People who, without waiting for the push of the state to rise, revealed a “new culture of self -help and initiative”. In entrepreneurs, he saw the possible social base for a renewed development policy: less statist and paternalistic, more qualifying.
Studies based on data from the Latinobarometer and Lapop institutes confirm the diagnosis of Unger. Entrepreneurs seem to value individual initiative, freedom of choice and meritocracy. Moreover, they tend to be conservative in customs; They suspect – as many other Brazilians – from parties and the state; and are sensitive to the appeal of antipolytic.
It is counterproductive to label them as poor precarious ones who, through the tricks of false consciousness, are not perceived as such and, therefore, are captured by the right speech. It is worth taking their views of the world seriously, anchored in the life experience, and to propose policies that make sense of them.
Also, as it seems, their hearts and minds will be at the center of the 2026 dispute.
Gift Link: Did you like this text? Subscriber can release seven free hits from any link per day. Just click on F Blue below.
