PL leader said he will talk a lot with presidents of other parties to only have Flávio facing Lula in the first round
The president of the PL, Valdemar Costa Neto, recognized the difficulty of aligning with Gilberto Kassab, leader of the PSD, given the party’s decision not to give up on launching its own candidate for the Presidency of the Republic.
To the report, the PL leader said that “it’s difficult, everyone has their own interests”, but added: “We’re still going to talk a lot!”. The divergence occurs after Valdemar defended that, in the first round of the elections, only two names were in the dispute: President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT) and Senator Flávio Bolsonaro (PL-RJ).
Valdemar’s motives
For Valdemar, the concentration of candidacies would be a way to avoid the fragmentation of the electorate and strengthen a competitive alternative to the current government from the start of the electoral process. The strategy, however, clashes with the position of the PSD, led by Gilberto Kassab, which believes that it is essential to have its own name in the presidential race as a way of asserting the party’s political weight and expanding its negotiating power on the national stage.
The PSD is today one of the most relevant acronyms in Congress and occupies strategic spaces in state administrations and the federal government. Internally, the reading is that giving up on a presidential candidacy in the first round would mean reducing protagonism and influence at a decisive moment of reorganization of political forces.
Valdemar, in turn, admits that building a consensus will be complex, given the different interests of the parties involved.
Deadlocks on the right
The speech shows that, despite the willingness to dialogue, there is still a long way to go until an eventual convergence in the center-right camp. The impasse also reflects the absence of a clear definition of the opposition’s design for the next presidential election, especially in a context of polarization and internal disputes for space and protagonism.
While the PL is betting on simplifying the electoral scenario from the first round, the PSD maintains the strategy of acting autonomously, betting that the political strength of the party can be decisive in defining the direction of the second round and in the formation of future alliances. And Kassab guarantees that he still does not have a favorite among governors Ratinho Jr, Eduardo Leite and Ronaldo Caiado.
