RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – During a speech to the Workers’ Party (PT) faithful, celebrating the party’s 40th anniversary this weekend in Rio, the former mayor of São Paulo and the party’s defeated candidate in the 2018 presidential elections, Fernando Haddad, criticized President Jair Bolsonaro and the Minister of Economy, Paulo Guedes.
“We are becoming barbarians without even realizing what these guys are doing. The President says that an HIV-positive patient is expensive to the country? He’s the one who is expensive! This country’s greatest cost is Bolsonaro,” Haddad said in a reference to Bolsonaro’s recent statement.
Haddad then criticized another speech, one by Paulo Guedes, but began by addressing the issue as if Bolsonaro had been the one who made the statement, but ultimately mentioned the Minister of Economy.
“Calling a public servant a parasite? A guy [Bolsonaro] who spent 28 years in the Federal Chamber, a guy who split cabinet money to get rich at the expense of embezzled public money, this guy has the guts to call someone a parasite?”
“A guy who came from the financial market [Paulo Guedes], who has only dealt with speculation all his life, never produced a thing, now calls someone else a parasite? It’s time to get out,” Haddad said at the end of his 12-minute speech.
Haddad took part in the panel “Democracy under threat: violence, discrimination and censorship”, with six other guests, among them representatives of the black, feminist and LGBT movements.
Last to speak, he mentioned the internal criticisms of the progressive camp according to which the left-wing parties, including PT, have lost ground to the right-wing for having made too much room for the so-called identity agendas.
“I will not give up the debate on racism, feminism, any more than I will give up the minimum wage discourse either. In our PT governments we never did that, in the 1980s, 1990, 2000. We never chose who we were going to leave behind”.
“This party has never left any important agenda behind”, said the leftist, who was challenged by a unionist at the end of his speech for not mentioning and supporting the oil tankers’ strike, which took place on Friday at Petrobras’ headquarters.
Haddad said that this type of question, about how the left-wing should act, undermines the party. “These guys keep giving fascist speeches and someone says: ‘Oh, don’t say that, otherwise they’ll come after us.’, that’s when we have to go after them,” he said.
The leftist said that Bolsonaro “keeps on insulting, every day there is someone being insulted” by him. “One minute it’s the wife of the President of France, older than him. He is a Democrat in insulting, he insults everyone except his cowardly fellows, who go on social media making ‘fake news'”.
“And they spare no one. Now, if we get scared of social media, scared of fascists, they’ll move forward. Now, if we show the strength that we’ve always had, they’ll back off, and we’ll be governed by decent people again”.