The most recent books by the former minister, pre-candidate for the Presidency of the Republic for Christian Democracy (DC), take well-known themes as a basis for criticizing political leaders, groups and trends.
It also targeted non-governmental organizations (NGOs), especially foreign and Brazilian ones that receive funding from governments and entities in other countries.
The reading indicated Aldo still and moving. He was where he always was, on the nationalist front. On the other hand, the publication about the Amazon reiterated his distance from the left, the field in which he built most of his political career. A member of the organization for more than three decades, he had been a minister in the Lula 1st and Dilma governments.
In the new “Dom Pedro 1º – Caudilho do Brasil”, whose launch takes place this Tuesday (31), in São Paulo, the reflections are structured in a similar way. Aldo portrays the monarch as “Brazil’s greatest hero” and rebels against “the anti-national offensive of identitarianism and the woke agenda”, which “works to deconstruct the myths of common identity”.
According to the former minister, the emperor is the main victim of a contemporary historiography willing to prove that “our national construction process is nothing more than a succession of errors and crimes, an accumulation of ills and deformities”.
In Aldo’s view, this is a problem arising, among other factors, from the habit of “judging facts and characters from the past with the ruler and values of the present”.
This is not a biography in the conventional sense. Some chapters cover passages from his journey through Brazil, Portugal and France, and others record marks of his personality. There are also excerpts from the book dedicated to members of the monarchical elite, such as the empress and; to leaders of the battles for independence, such as ; and the names of the people who got involved in the cause, such as
In the final chapter, Aldo argues that “and Dom Pedro constitute the most symbolic of the founding myths of Brazilian nationality”.
For journalist and professor Carlos Alberto Di Franco, who signed the preface, “few figures in national history have been as unfairly caricatured as Dom Pedro 1º. With rare exceptions, his image was deformed by a historiography imbued with ideological bias.”
