Letter to the Editor by Raimundo da Silva, Brasilia
The mass demonstrations on Sept. 7, when more than a million citizens freely and spontaneously took to the streets in green and yellow to express their support and vote for President Jair Bolsonaro, immediately had a very instructive effect on understanding Brazil today.
They brought to light, more than ever before, an essential fact of political life in this country: the pure, simple, and repressed horror of the elites in general and the left, in particular, towards the Brazilian people.
That is usually hidden behind sanctimonious, cheap, and pretentious philosophizing in political science seminars and round tables with “experts” on television.
This time, however, it has become all too obvious and blunt. It is more than horror – it is hatred.
Undeniably, the entire crowd in the streets on Sept. 7 was the Brazilian people.
If not, then where did all those people come from – Mars? Also indisputable is the storm of anger that the presence of the people in the square immediately provoked among the leftists.
Former President Lula da Silva was the most insulting: he compared the demonstrations to a “meeting of the Ku Klux Klan,” the secret society of North American racists.
That is what Lula da Silva thinks of the Brazilian people when they speak out against him – they are all “racists.”
Justice Luís Roberto Barroso, on the other hand, called the demonstrators “fascists” – in his opinion, Sept. 7 served to show “the greatness of fascism” in Brazil.
The media overflowed with editorials complaining about the “threat to democracy” posed by the fact that the population took to the streets for demonstrations throughout the country without any disturbances or incidents.
On the anniversary of Brazil’s independence, the Brazilian people committed the “crime” of taking to the streets without asking permission from Lula da Silva, the ministers of the Federal Supreme Court, the journalists, and the rest of the elite.
There, everything is condemned as a manifestation of the extreme right – racist, fascist, and “anti-democratic.”
What could show their hatred for the people more clearly? The likelihood of da Silva bringing a comparable crowd to the streets of Brazil is nil.
He and the Workers’ Party know this perfectly well.
Result: They automatically react with obsessive hostility to everything not subject to their orders.
Since they cannot say that this mass was not the Brazilian people, they say that the Brazilian people are wrong when they go to the public square to express their political preferences.
That is the democracy they defend for Brazil. The adversary cannot open his mouth.
The problem for Lula da Silva and the left is that the real population only goes to the streets to demonstrate against him – and now for the President of the Republic.
Lula da Silva, in truth, never takes to the streets – and not even the Workers’ Party manages to gather people for a mass demonstration, apart from a few poor gatherings like the one for the release of his “Letter to Brazilians.”
They stay united with groups of trade unionists, artists, and others; that is their world.
It is quite remarkable that the candidate who presents himself as “popular” cannot even go to a soccer stadium for fear of being booed.
He did not attend a single game of the 2014 World Cup in Brazil when Dilma Rousseff and her party were still governing.
On that occasion, he stayed hidden at home.
Today, with the same fear of appearing in public, he calls Brazilians who won’t vote for him racists.