 Felly, wrth gwrs, rhaid i chi i ddim yn ystod y sefyllfa ar y methodig yma yma, mae'r rhagd iawn yma i'r unedig yma, ac rhaid i'w ddweud yma i ddweud rhaid i'w ddweud yr unrhyw yma'r collegau. Mae'r ddweud yma yn y cyfle cyflwyno ymlaen i'r gwaith sydd ar gyfer y sefyllfa yn Brysul, ac mae'n dweud ond yma ar y Fyldaeth, gan gweithio bod yn ysgrifennu gyda'r ysgrifennu, Bulsonaro, y gwaith populist a gwaith nescoeikydig honno. Bei amserrwydd, prifetysg, a dwi'r denialos, yn oed agnodol yn ynglyn hwnnw brydiau, ac mae'r gwerthoedd yn edrych i ddechrau bwysig, gwsig, hwnnw'n gweithio'n gweithio hwnnw, y dweud o frau llinuol, y ddechrau'n ei wath, ac i'r seculer��u'n yr hyn, mae'r ystod ni o'n ffronnwyr yn y eich radox. Dyna gwefan hynny yng Nghyrch Cynnau'r backpacku. the has far reaching global implications, and so why these developments in Brazil should concern us all? We have a very distinguished panel of speakers. I'll introduce each one of them in turn. They will speak for about 10 minutes, 10, maximum, 12 minutes and then we'll open it up to the floor so you can ask your questions. Alfredo are professor of political economy of the Department of Development study. for developing countries. His books include the value of marks and most recently, which I think there's a copy, a bantanai has a copy of Brazil neoliberalism versus democracy with Lecio Mores. Next we will hear from Pedro Loero, who's university lecturer in Latin American studies at University of Cambridge and he's written widely on the political economy of Latin America dealing with inequality, structural change and development strategies and he's published articles on topics ranging from Marxism to the Pinktide in Latin America. Then we'll hear from Marike Ritoff she's lecturer in Latin American politics in the Department of Modern Languages and Cultures at the University of Liverpool and her research focuses on the political strategies of the labour movements in Brazil and her books include Labour Relations in Development and most recently Labour mobilisation Politics and Globalisation in Brazil between Militancy and Moderation and then pen ultimately we'll hear from Francisco Dominguez who is senior lecturer in the business school at Middlesex University he's written extensively on development and political change within Latin America and he's written books on identity and discursive practices Spain and Latin America right wing politics in the new Latin America reaction and revolt. And finally we'll hear from Anthony Pereira who is professor at King's College of the Kings Brazil Institute and he's written widely on Brazil authoritarianism and neoliberalism and his books include the end of the peasantry the emergence of the moral labour movement in northeastern Brazil and political injustice authoritarianism and the rule of law in Brazil, Chile and Argentina. So and just to say also if you're tweeting the hashtags are so asked dev studies and ESRC there's also a sign up sheet going around if you're not a member of staff or a student at so as you can get on our mailing list and if you want to know more about the seminars that we're having later on in the term there's a leaflet there you can pick up afterwards. So without further ado we'll hear from Alfredo. Thanks very much. Is this my phone working? No? Closer? Does this work? Okay, good. So what I'm going to argue true is that what's happening in Brazil is a political tragedy that can be seen in four parts. The first part is the global context. We know that there is a rise in a rising tide of authoritarian forms of neoliberalism today which is a symptom of three processes taking place in different countries. There is a crisis of economies, of political systems and of institutions of representations after the global financial crisis that started in 2007. Associated with this there is a decomposition of neoliberal systems of political democracy and there is the hijacking of mass discontent by the far right because neoliberalism itself has brought an erosion of the sense of collectivity and agency based on shared material circumstances and then connected to this the degradation of working class cultures and working class political capacities through neoliberal reforms and fiscal austerity. So the consequence has been that around the world very large groups of people have lost out under neoliberalism they can recognize very clearly the damage that they have suffered at the level of the economy and they distrust the dysfunctionality of neoliberal democracies that have systematically reproduced and validated the conditions the policies, the circumstances that erode their economic rights and their political rights and that have done nothing to address their grievances. They are also led systematically by the media and by right-wing politicians the other for the disasters that are inflicted by neoliberalism and the other can be the immigrants can be the poor, the other can be another country, can be another religion it can be something else but something else that is out there that doesn't belong within us. And several commentators have assimilated the rise of authoritarian neoliberalism today to the rise of fascism in the 1920s and 30s and there are similarities that we can discuss but there are significant differences in particular if you look at the authoritarian leaders in power in the United States in Austria, Turkey, India Hungary, Italy, Egypt, Poland, etc. They have made their way into power not through militias not through confrontations against the political enemy in the case of communism but they have made their way to power through clever ploys through expensive advertising through planned agitation and by brute force always with a view to enforce a radical neoliberal program justified by a conservative political discourse that pretends to be nationalistic when in fact it is not it's just neoliberal and then using the apparatus of the state to steamroll the opposition this is not organized mass politics as the politics of fascism in the 30s was this is the politics of demagogues this is the politics of con-men this is the politics of illusionists who rose to power by exploring country specific factors in the global neoliberal order and this is going on around the world including in this country of course but now Brazil is the country of concern the second aspect of my story has to do with the shifts in the political alliances supporting successive presidents in Brazil between 1999 and 2005 Lula was supported by what I call an alliance of losers social groups that had in common only the experience of losses under neoliberalism and to keep the support of desperate social groups what the workers party did was to commit to govern within the rules to commit to maintaining neoliberal economic policies and to commit to do a little bit of distribution at the margin and there were four main social groups in this alliance of losers there was the unionized urban working class skilled office workers lower ranks of the civil service and sections of the professional middle class there were also very large segments of the informal working class there were also many prominent domestic capitalists especially within the internal bourgeoisie in the country and several right wing traditional oligarchs, landowners traditional politicians who saw an opportunity to maintain power with what they thought was a weak administration in Brazilia that is a set of alliances that lasted until 2005 and 2013 the second administration of Lula and the first administration of Dilmar Rousseff the constellation of forces changed and it became what I call an alliance of winners that brought together the social groups that had won under the previous administration of the workers party and this was very very similar in composition to the popular fronts that the pro-soviet communist parties around the global south were proposing in the 1950s and 60s you had the internal bourgeoisie you had the formal sector workers and you had very large sectors of the informal working class that benefited from the social policies of the PT administration they lost the middle class at the beginning of the Lula administration under Dilmar Rousseff in 2013-14 she was elected by the alliance of winners that had been built by Lula she was re-elected in 2014 by a much narrower set of social groups that I'm calling a progressive alliance organized urban workers primarily the unorganized poor and left wing parties movements and NGOs noticed the loss of capital capital broke with Dilmar Rousseff relatively early on and she incrementally lost the support of a succession of subgroups in society in parliament in the judicial system and we can talk about this but she was impeached by a judicial parliamentary coup in 2016 and replaced by her vice president Michel Temet now if you look in contrast at the opposition then what you see is a widening neoliberal alliance or alternatively an alliance of privilege that had three core groups one is the internationalized section and financialized section of capital you have the urban middle class very close alliance cemented by the right wing media and you had sections of the informal growing sections of the informal workers a group largely by extremely conservative evangelical christian churches the neoliberal alliance's power in 2016 as part of a systematic process of demolition of democracy to destroy not Dilmar Rousseff per se but to destroy any spaces by which the majority of the population could control even a tiny bit of the state apparatus or any levers of public policy that was the agenda of the coup it was not anything else everything else was secondary so Jair Bolsonaro when he comes up from basically nowhere and becomes the leader of this neoliberal alliance he is thriving on the basis of what existed before but developing his program based on four main pillars pillar one is the pillar of corruption campaigns against corruption and the corruption of the workers party in particular corruption is important because this is the traditional way in which the Brazilian right gains political traction among the population in 1954, 1961, 1989 2013 corruption is the only way corruption and inflation the only ways by which the right gains mass traction and wins elections second pillar is conservative moral values that Feizi mentioned before any deviancy from established norms is to be opposed with violence absolutely no problem with that associated with that the discourse of security this is a big thing in Brazil there were 60,000 murders in Brazil last year poor people in particular are afraid their neighborhoods are the biggest victims of crime and the middle classes get excited by all the violence they see on TV what you see at 6pm in several TV channels is a succession of TV programs talking about the crimes of the day somebody was stabbed 58 times look at this somebody else ran away from prison look at this etc every day and finally a very strongly neoliberal discourse with the argument that it's important to take the state off the backs of people the dead weight of the bureaucracy the dead weight of government because government is corrupt anyway and it is also inefficient so across most of these issues and Francisco can correct me this has a tremendous similarity with Pinochet in Chile yes I like instant confirmation the election of Bolsonaro the first round was also supported by Steve Bannon as a main adviser and by Cambridge Analytica and all the usual suspects on the global far right now we get to the third aspect of this story which is the election itself there has been a wave of mass support for Bolsonaro a politically no individual who did not show up for any debates on television because he has nothing to say and everyone knows that and this wave of support was fed as a way to stop the return of the workers party and the return of Lula in particular to power five years of relentless media attacks and official persecution and then imprisonment of Lula and he was still rising in the polls as the virtual candidate of the PT touching on 40% of the vote and this was not to be allowed he was not permitted to be a candidate but he was incredibly astute as a political operator appointed Fernando Adad a close colleague to be the PT presidential candidate and Adad started rising very rapidly in the opinion polls 25% to the score of 25% that he reached but this campaign was very tightly focused on the progressive alliance it did not have the support of the middle class quite the contrary didn't have the support of the capital and it did not have the support of many unorganized poor especially those that are associated with evangelical churches so in addition to the stunning rise of Bolsonaro the other story in this campaign was the political capacities of Lula who from behind prison from behind bars was able to orchestrate a campaign that was so successful that takes the PT to the second round now what happens my final comment what happens if Adad is elected the answer is he cannot govern he will not govern so I'm not even going to discuss this it is also impossible for Bolsonaro to govern he does not have firm allies his rejection rates are very high and his personality is very unstable he has no experience in government no team of tried and tested advisors no political party to speak of and there are 29 different parties in congress with whom you need to ally yourself in order to make legislation possible messages then final messages clearly Bolsonaro has won this election at least on the political domain he won the south he won the southeast on the north he won the center west he only lost in the northeast the poorest region in Brazil the election is over, politically it's over and this is symptomatic of the isolation of the workers party since 2013 they lost the capacity to represent and govern the country I still voted for them but they cannot govern two thirds of the congress are on the far right and it's not the moderate right it's the far right and in addition there is a block of power associated with the capital in the southern regions of the country the judiciary the public prosecution service the federal police the media and the army pushing for neoliberal reforms and to exclude the PT from office if Adad won power he would have to call a constituent assembly because it's impossible to govern this way if he calls a constituent assembly that will overwhelm the assembly and the constitution will be worse than the current one it's not possible to win we also know that Bolsonaro's rise comes from a combination of traditional class hatred in a slave society what continues to be a slave society current insecurities and hatred against the left and the US led planning no doubt about that it is also possible to argue that since 2013 in Brazil it has been structured by a convergence of dissatisfactions from a cross society that has helped to stabilize the neoliberal alliance even though their program is to the detriment of the vast majority of the population at least economically Brazilian democracy then has been degraded I think beyond repair in the sense that it is implausible to consider any constellation of forces that would stabilize the economy and stabilize the political system at the same time so my conclusion is that it is very unlikely that there will be a constitutional exit from the current economic and political crisis in Brazil I am pessimistic in that sense thanks very much thank you Alfredo, next we'll hear from Pedro for Fredo give a bit of a wider range in picture I'll focus on what the PT did when they were in power and how that is an element of the crisis situation in which we find ourselves so I'll begin with three interviews so in March the first 2018 Lula is interviewed by Foliot Sampaolo a big newspaper in Brazil and he says, I'm proud to say that my government was appeared when business people made the most money when the wages of workers rose the most when there were the fewest rural land occupations the fewest urban squads and the fewest strikes and then I see the so-called market afraid of Lula but this can't be the owners of Itaubra, Descu, Santander, three big banks 25 July 2018 Ada the candidate is interviewed by Opais and he's asked how we're going to drive economic growth and his answers are we're going to reactivate several public private partnerships we're going to do many joint ventures with state-owned enterprises and we're going to offer public concessions of services to private businesses this can be done without any difficulty later in the interview he's asked so there's this business elite in the country he interrupts the reporter and says the business elite is very well contemplated in our proposals in the first place I mentioned public private partnerships big undertakings we will not let anything go uncared for I'm going a bit back in time Dilma is interviewed by the Financial Times December 2016 so after the coup and they say so Dilma calls her impeachment a coup and they ask her so why didn't you barricade yourself and resist she answers that well in the current struggle it's different we've got democratically functioning institutions so this is the way to fight a coup so I think this is the conundrum that the PT faced they get to the point of saying there is a coup but you fight a coup with purportedly functioning democratic institutions so this is pragmatism turned to utopianism beyond any basis in reality and I think that this is the culmination of a political strategy that they develop consistently throughout their time and power so what I want to argue here is that one of the elements that explains the current situation it's not the only one but it's a central element is that the PT clung on to a shrink in centre it was not because the PT redistributed too much income it was not because they were too progressive it was not because they were too left wing that this led to a coup that this led to a political and economic crisis it was that they hung on to a centre that didn't exist anymore so they would have this approach of managing for all what Lula was saying banks never made so much money except perhaps for what they call a resentful middle class and avoid conflicts and popular organization Lula is proud to say that there were a few strikes that were a few squats they consistently tried to undermine independent social movements and independent trade unions and this approach of committing yourself to supporting subjects saying that you are interested in the benefit of the poor but as chewing any form of antagonism any form of organization has the consequence that when things go wrong it's not a problem of politics it's a problem of management so you're doing your whole government saying that we can cater to all everybody can win, there's no fundamental conflict we have to address so when things go wrong you're just managing it incorrectly it's not a problem of politics it's a problem of changing whoever's up in the state putting things right doing the correct economic policies taking away the weight of the bureaucracy and so on and so forth and in this case, in this situation that corruption assumes such an important role because corruption is obviously the big enemy of an functioning administration a corrupt administration will not work properly if you're doing your whole politics based on we got to manage this thing right, there's no conflict then if you're corrupt you're obviously not the one to be there and there will be no popular organized front to confront that to say that well actually there's a class conflict there's a conflict of fundamental interest and you need to take sides so yes, part of the vote for Bolsonaro, the rejection of the political establishment is a vote against corruption yes, it's also a vote against the massive economic crisis the recovery of the renewed increase of extreme poverty and of unemployment and so on but it takes special meaning in a context where the popular agents that could fight against this have been consistently depoliticized so yes it's corruption, it's the economic crisis it's the political crisis but in a particular context that involves demobilization so give a couple of examples of these pragmatic politics that the PT took forward so the distribution of income it's sort of a synthesis of these dimensions there was an increase of income at the bottom of the distribution extreme poverty decreased from 13% to about 5% of the population there was greater access to a wider range of goods for people at the bottom of the distribution the formalization of low-skilled jobs and rise in wages for low-skilled workers at the same time you had a maintenance of capital income the top 1% depending on the data source used continued to capture about 25% of national income during the time that the PT was empowered and this was particularly due to capitalist income the only group that was squeezed were professional workers a sort of traditional middle class then again the banks never profiting as much whilst poverty was decreased encapsulates this well with public education or the education more generally actually you had the biggest increase in public higher education for several decades in Brazil but at the same time the share of enrollment in public higher education decreased from 30% of enrollment in higher education to about 25% so it's the commodification of higher education through loans state subsidized loans and through tax cuts so introducing working class individuals into higher education through state subsidized loans whilst also having a simultaneous increase of public education one of the results of this is that Croton investment fund-owned Brazilian educational company became the biggest private higher education company in the world you have a similar process with health that tax assumptions to health services and other forms of state sponsored subsidies to the private sector to provide health made the profits of private health insurance providers triple during the PT government whilst about a third of the budget of the health ministry is tax assumptions or other forms of support for private capital we can talk about housing as well and that also has a similar process but through all this process yes social mobility did occur in Brazil people did ascend to higher levels of income but it just came to mean exit in poverty get in a formal low-skilled job accessing state subsidized credit to pay for private health insurance and private education perhaps that's not exactly the horizon of social change that the party had in previous decades I've got one and a half minutes to wrap up I'll say about something about the 2013 protests in Brazil so there was this mass movements in the streets the biggest popular movements in Brazil for decades and they were disparate they demanded several different things they were not coordinated but they had very strong progressive elements in them what did the PT do instead of looking to that and saying we can be the spearhead of this we can offer the connection at the level of state power to implement change and coordinate towards a progressive dimension no they repressed the movements they had smoke and mirrors and didn't say anything about police brutality if a left wing popular based party cannot see in the streets people demanding good quality education health sources strength but something to be repressed then surely there's something really going wrong with this party and they carry on with that there's a 2014 elections of Fredo mentioned that the alliance changed but right after the 2014 election what do they do? they implement austerity policies they even put a former banker into the finance ministry which they had criticized during the campaigns they tried to cling on to the centre but then they were imposed in austerity policies and they wouldn't get the support of capital because it wasn't their natural ally anyways they were happy to support the capital was happy to support the PT whilst there was growth but it has kept losing allies and hemorrhaging throughout the whole time in government and what could they offer? well, Adat told us recently in this interview public private partnerships joint ventures offering public services to private businesses really that's the sort of pragmatism that the PT still thinks that can happen sometimes it makes you wonder why didn't they get less votes than they did it's a tragedy it is and I still hope that against all odds they can make it in the second turn but this offers us a lot to think about how, when and to which extent can reformist left-wing strategies advance and what is the timing for reforms, deeper reforms and retreats thank you thanks very much Pedro, so we'll hear now from Marike Rital okay well, I want to say first of all I'm not Brazilian but I do I've been travelling to Brazil for a long time to the research and I'm very concerned about what is happening over there so I think we're all probably feeling very worried what this means for the world for Brazil in particular so what I would like to do now in the next 10 minutes is to see what the role has been of labour mobilisation in recent years so I think it's an interesting perspective to look at some of the various mobilisation movements that have been going on in Brazil and what it might mean for the future and also what it explains for where we are now and I would like to finish a question really about what we mean by polarisation so I have been doing research on trade union political strategies in Brazil including the relationship between trade unions and the PT and their political agendas and debates and one of things I've noticed when I started doing this research is a very strong drive towards pragmatism so convergence between the PT's agenda and the majority of the unions but I don't think that is the full story particularly in the last few years so one of the areas for example where we can see a lot of interesting development is a new contestation around the effects of Brazil's development policies and large development projects so I think the key question is one of the key questions is what is the relationship between what happens under the PT governments and what is happening now and I think there are other factors as well so this is part of the explanation and one of the debates that we see now and I think people will be talking about for a very long time to what extent have the PT governments partially caused or contributed to this crisis so you can see this argument on various sides of the debates including the point that the PT has managed particularly under the economic crisis properly the issue of corruption scandals and of course Bolsonaro has been able to capitalise and turn it against the PT and riding on the wave of dissatisfaction of these issues and another side of the debate is whether the PT was actually progressive enough did it do enough to reform the political system well I don't think so it's also a very hard thing to do but part of the problem is of course the difficulties of the presidency and the conservative majority that we see now in congress which are very hard to overcome by a progressive agenda and also the question of tackling inequality in political participation and in income and elitism and of course you can't expect these to change in 13 years but there's a question to be raised here so you can also see this this debate mirrored in trade unions and if we look at the period since 2003, since Lula came to power I noticed that trade unions the close allies of the PT among the unions were very reluctant to rock the boat and to protest against the government and to challenge the government to take policies beyond a certain level so this means that unions became a force of moderation rather than a critic of the government and you could also say that in some respects the unions absorbed the governmental logic not just absorbed but also participated in the government and also absorbed the electoral logic of the PT having to be a broad church party that needed to attract a lot of voters across the political spectrum so these are forces leading to moderation of the union movement which could potentially have been a movement that challenged the government so in my book I've also looked at the other side of the story so is it really true that the unions as one of the founding groups of the PT were so moderate all the time and I became interested in how has union activity developed over time in the Brazilian since the late 70s so you can see larger increases of strike action in the 80s and also the first half of the 90s which were forms of mobilisation against government policy against economic reforms but also more recently and this is something that has maybe surprised many people and has led to an increased interest again in the union movement have in strikes up to 3000 a year which is I think a 15 fold increase in 2013 so so what does this mean for the current situation well it means on the one hand that there is mobilisation happening in Brazil so it is not just drive towards conservative mass demonstration which of course have dominated the streets and the news but there is also less visibly other mobilisations going on I think again the union, the established union movement so the Cooch was quite hesitant to get involved in these these kinds of less organised strikes and also in the mass demonstrations as Pedro also emphasised in relation to the PT but there were strikes there was a general strike in protest against labour reform that were unusual compared to what had been happening before so I think what I'm not sure about of course is whether this has potential to continue Bolsonaro has already indicated that he will crack down on activism so that doesn't look very positive so there will not be space for movements or unions to participate in government I imagine but of course we've also seen the large women's march which is very encouraging to see that there is a very large appetite to mobilise against these conservative values what is problematic of course is that these mass demonstrations haven't had an impact on the support for Bolsonaro so a negative impact I should say but there is potential here so one of my questions and I don't necessarily have an answer to that right now but why have the other side of the protest a progressive rather than a conservative protest why have they become overshadowed by the extreme conservative sentiment so we've seen a shift from 2013 where the protest had a progressive element to the impeachment demonstrations which called for politicians Lula and Dilma to be jailed for and now we've seen quite a few expressions of violence in the immediate aftermath of the elections against PT and voters or non-Bol scenario voters so that could be a situation where these types of sentiments will clash and that could be quite dangerous but I'm hoping that there will be continuation as well of demonstrations on the other side despite the crackdown what we've seen as well under the Temer government that has been returned to mobilisation and demonstrations we've seen many demonstrations happening in this time and also in the in the period leading up to the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff so this also leads me to a question that has been kind of on my mind recently and I would like to finish with that and that is what exactly do we mean by polarisation in this case and I think quite often in the media and by commentators the polarisation is presented as the far left against the far right which is very inaccurate I'm not saying that Bolsonaro isn't far right he absolutely is but I think the other side of the story is quite different and it's very unhelpful to present Haddad as a far leftist because that plays exactly into the discourse of Bolsonaro preventing the left or socialism or communism even in Brazil happening so I think we need to look at what constitutes this polarisation so we've seen big regional differences of very strong support for Bolsonaro's certain parts of the country and not others rich and poor of course Bolsonaro's support also cuts across these categories which is interesting and there have been some interesting comments on that the reasons for that have become explored further and gender in ways are other areas where we can see a split in support or not for Bolsonaro and Haddad ideological differences are tricky so it's not need left-right spectrum in this case so conservatism is very important versus liberal values and these cut across the left-right division so to conclude it's a very worrying scenario I think looking at the votes and how they stack up and the prospects for the next round Haddad doesn't have a huge amount of scope to steal votes from Bolsonaro but he would need to mobilise the non-voters and so I'm not hopeful for the 28th but let's try to be optimistic thank you can I just get some of these people here to just move over here so we can get some more people in because there are people kind of mining around at the top if that's alright there is some space here you can sit here and probably there is some kachos over there if that's possible that's great thank you okay and whoever obviously wants to right okay so Francisco hello hello it's very hot here I want to have a conversation with you rather than tell you the answers to things even though I have some views on matters I want you to look at Brazil as if you were a member of the bourgeoisie this is not easy for everybody but we have to understand what exactly has been unfolding here ever since 2016 I think Bolsonaro is another step in the unfolding of the quarter that began in 2016 if you look at the situation in Brazil from 2002 and then you projected to 2016 and you are a member of the bourgeoisie say somebody like Aesion Eves you know somebody who sneezes very heavily and in 2016 the situation was the workers party was elected and won the presidency in 2002 all the way to 2006 they got re-elected in 2006 all the way to 2010 they got re-elected in 2010 2014 they got re-elected again in 2014 to 2018 and in 2016 they announced that their candidate was going to be Lula that is to say the prospect of Lula winning in 2018 and then staying as a blessing between 2018 and 2022 and very likely to stand for re-election all the way to 2026 if you are the bourgeoisie you think this is completely intolerable you are not going to allow these no-destiners to run your show for that long doing all the things that they do however reformist they may be that they find intolerable and therefore it seems to be the best way to understand it they decided to go for broke and they capitalised and took advantage of the complexities and difficulties created by the economic crisis that healed the world 2008, 2009, 2010 and so on it is quite important to look at it from that point of view because I hope that all of you are on the other side number two these election that has just been won by Jair excuse the familiarity was one because the establishment in Brazil created quasi dictatorial conditions and I am not exaggerating this not only they have been able to actually overthrow out Dilma Rousseff the first woman president of the country they got away with that and they got away with imprisoning the most popular politician in the country and they gave him nine years and then they increased that to 12 years and got away with that they used the judiciary to threaten politicians in order to give them to give them what they know in Brazil as Delassoes Premiatus which is you know plea bargaining you tell me what I want and I used a confession against somebody I want to hit very hard this is not the whole context law fair was used extremely effectively and I think it's one of the strategies that now the powers that be in the world or put it differently imperialism are using against everybody these elections took place in the context of a total intoxicating media propaganda of demonization against the workers party don't get me wrong I know the workers party is not perfect just find me a perfect party anyway I'll join you nevertheless the campaign of demonization was disgusting was intoxicating it's like you know in the past when people were drug addicts or alcoholic they subjected to a version treatment they gave them something they declined so much throughout the day and they associated that with something such as alcohol and the idea was that you actually became totally averse to it this was being done in Latin American countries to the same effect let me give you one example I can give you more in Venezuela they have used exactly the same in Venezuela the right wing the private sector controls 85% of the media in Brazil the right wing the private sector controls 150% of the media if you see what I mean so there was no outlet that the government could use to put across a good message so I'm not surprised that under those conditions it is very difficult to win an election especially when the left and the democrats are divided which they were so that's the first point I want to make the second point is that Bolsonaro is a very clear message of simplistic certainties things are black and white everything is very simple but the reason why I think they were very successful is because these very extremist some of them highly repagnant a statement that he was making deliberately again and again and again was because they fell on fertile ground I think you and I you Brazilians and I non-Brazilian although Brazilians by heart are surprised actually to the degree to which people in Brazil seem to have accepted these messages to the tune of 46 47% of the electorate we are talking about 48 million people I'm not saying that all of them are but the Brazilian elite is deeply deeply racist and it's deeply deeply classist in English works as well as in Portuguese classist in Portuguese sounds better so this message actually affects not only the elite which is very small but it affects the various layers of the middle class high middle class middle middle class lower middle class and probably somebody else such as the evangelicals that have been mentioned so this is actually a new way of winning power or certainly winning elections this has been done at the cost of the collapse of the traditional parties the PMDB his candidate Mireille's got one bloody percent excuse my French and Acemin got 4% these parties used to get 30 40 or more percent there is something that has collapsed there is no question about it this is going to be to their cost you can't really organise and run a society as difficult, as large and as enormous and as complex as Brazil with just a simplistic guy called the eight balls on arrow you need something much more sophisticated you need political machineries you need compromises you need institutions and you see that they will pay a price for this now what is the I've been threatened here by the chair what is the objective because we need to be clear about this I think we have to understand and certainly this is what I'm going to be doing from now on, campaigning everywhere I can being campaigning for the left on Brazil and so on for some time there is a model of democracy with inverted commas which have been emerging and come from Washington and the model is Colombia this is the ideal model of democracy that they want to impose everywhere they do not like the type of dictatorship like Pinochet because they are too complicated they are illegitimate they prefer a government that has the legitimacy of having been democratically elected that has the capacity and the legitimacy to go around killing people this is what the Colombians do it seems to me that this is the model this model involves the objective of trying to eradicate the left because for now in that sense it's totally clear that's what he says he wants to do and if you listen to his wife presidential running mate Maud Al who is really scaring he does exactly what he says he wants to do and if you look at what they have done from the moment they got to power with Temer and Campany all the way up to now that's exactly they created a state of exception which is run on the basis of neoliberalism where all the gains social economic and political have been reversed systematically that wants to institutionalize this to make it permanent you know in that sense changed the constitution is not going to be too difficult excuse me I need some kachasa so I will finish give me one minute so this is what we are facing of course there are lessons to be learnt huge number of them never ever if you are running a party in a country that size stop mobilizing your base never that's lethal because when they attack you you don't have the time to reorganize them quickly you have to keep them constantly mobilized I think they are learning that quite well hopefully they will prove all the lessons what is posed in Brazil is this where Jair Bolsonaro to win there will be a brutal systematic attack on everything that we know which is civilized all the democratic rights people will be discriminated and attacked for being different you know the picture already so our job is going to make sure that we create an international context in such such as in the UK that that is unacceptable and the way to make it unacceptable is to tell our politicians never to support that whoever is in government whoever is in the position to persuade all of them and finally a point of hope and positive the continent is changing we were hoping that Brazil was going to be part of this transformation that has become something interesting despite the huge control the United States exerts of a Mexico they lost Mexico they haven't lost it completely there are processes but the very fact that with the level of control with somebody like Donald in the White House actually putting pressure on the Mexicans and the fact that the Mexicans were able to elect you know Lopez Obrador is incredibly extraordinary I never thought it was possible and I know this because I was an international server in the Mexican relations that took place recently and I saw the people in the streets screaming and shouting chanting they were absolutely delighted and everything is done everything is indicating that actually he is going to join a progressive alliance not only in Latin America but elsewhere this is going to complicate the life both of Brazil but also of the United States and if which is a bigger if adage I think that's how you pronounce it right if adage becomes the president I practice this at home if adage becomes the president then you can imagine what they are going to throw at him they are going to throw at him everything including the kitchen sink and we have to be here prepared to defend absolutely everything so whatever happened the presidents are going to give us a huge amount of work by the Brazil by the democracy thank you thank you Francisco for that and finally we are here from Anthony Pereira does this one work can you hear me okay good I'll try to offer compliment what my colleagues have said by offering a few observations of what why Bolsonaro his messages seem to resonate that's I think difficult for a lot of us to understand we can all see the election returns we can see that he won in four of the five regions of Brazil and that he's the favorite to win in the second round but what is it that he's saying that seems to have such appeal and then I wanted to make a few observations about maybe what future government could look like and Bolsonaro has been at this for a long time I spoke to someone in the camera who sat next to me and said he had no interest in sorry he had no interest in policy no interest in legislation but he spent a lot of time sending videos to people who asked him for them he's very good at using social media and he speaks directly to people and I think I agreed with Alfred when he talked about the pillars of Bolsonaro's message but I'd like to add a couple of other things I think he marries neoliberalism and the anti-corruption anxiety in a very interesting way because what he says is we can only reduce corruption by reducing the size of the state to me this is a complete fallacy you can have very corrupt privatization processes you can have very corrupt business state relations in a state that's tiny like Guatemala is in Central America and you can have relatively low levels of corruption in large states like in Scandinavia this is how he brings the anti-corruption message together with the neoliberal message cut the state he's talking about 50 state enterprises going to be privatized or eliminated as soon as he gets into office he and Paulo Guedes disagree Guedes thinks there are no strategic sectors and you just privatize everything Bolsonaro being a nationalist said no there are strategic sectors we have to hold on to those but he marries those two anxieties in a very interesting way and he also talks about unity he has this very peculiar vision of what unity should be for Brazil because it's one that he talks about if you look at his videos his recent videos that he's posted he talks about sorry I'm getting lost here he talks about the evangelical church leaders he talks about the people of the fields both agribusiness and small farmers truck drivers civil and military police armed forces and the Brazilian family that's not actually everyone but he talks about your values will be respected the innocence of children in the classroom will be protected and he's discovered now that he loves the northeast he loves his father-in-law who's from Siena he thinks northeasterners are Brazilians just like everyone else because he's seeing the electoral returns he thinks I've got to increase my vote total there so he's working on that he's telling the northeasterners we have no intention to abolish Bolsa Familia we have no intention of abolishing the 13th month and I think this idea of unity is really a revision of the entire 30 odd years of Brazilian democracy he's saying we've got to do something different from what we've done for the last 30 years he's not talking about just the PT he's talking about the 1988 constitution and the culture of rights and re-indications he's talking about activists being a problem right so he's talking about a social order in which it's god family and private property it's very much like the march in 1964 that preceded the coup he says that the workers party practiced terrorism and he says that the country faces two paths prosperity, liberty, family, God and religion or Venezuela right as Francisco was saying black and white, cartoonish incredibly simplistic but understandable a lot of people are saying no Venezuela that doesn't sound good I actually different from Alfredo I think and this is an unfortunate conclusion that I've reached I think he could govern if you watched what happened to Michelle Tamer in May of 2017 when the prosecutor general when all this evidence came out and then later the prosecutor general presented very credible evidence of high level corruption and very large scale corruption to the supreme court Tamer clung on because Tamer could if you got money the majority in congress basically and Bolsonaro is already working to create this his party is little Pesielli is going to be the second largest bankada in the lower house after the PT he's got a son in the senate and a son in the lower house a lot of the people in congress will say well, Bolsonaro has a mandate if he wins in the second round we will make this work and he's already moving to the center he's the center right candidate now of course we probably most of us would disagree he's a hard right candidate but he's saying he's up the center and he will abandon I think things that he's promised that prove to be difficult he will back off things he will be bad for lots of things that we a lot of people in this room probably care about environmental regulation affirmative action gender equality so on and so on but he will back off on a lot of the hard stuff if he gets resistance so what I worry about more than Bolsonaro a Bolsonaro administration is Bolsonaro Bolsonaro in the streets Bolsonaro in institutions where people feel liberated to express this very perverse view of unity of national unity which doesn't allow for difference because the language is very reminiscent of the language of the dictatorship it's that we are a Brazilian family we are harmonious I'm not against Afro-Brazilians when I'm against the workers party pitting Afro-Brazilians against whites and I'm against women being pitted against men I'm going to protect women their mothers and wives and so on it's a very patriarchal discourse but it has a place for everyone it's a bit like one nation conservativism we're all in this together and if you just don't be an agitator and an activist and respect the hierarchy it will protect you and this is another thing I worry about too because I'm saying I worry less about a Bolsonaro administration than a Bolsonaroism but last year according to the national forum for public security the police killed over 5,000 people imagine if the president is saying we're not going to investigate police killings the gloves are off go for it so I think ultimately what Francisco is saying makes sense in the sense that this kind of discourse of national unity may have been plausible and may have been effective in the 1960s I'm not sure it can really work in 2019 in Brazil it's a discourse that could implode under the weight of its own contradictions because so many people will be excluded from the acceptable people who are included think of the list that I read of his last video evangelical leaders truck drivers the armed forces the civil and military police a lot of people left out so I agree with Alfredo that if Adagio pulls off a miracle and actually wins in the second round he will have a lot of difficulty governing because Bolsonaro will probably say there was fraud I was ripped off I really won and they stole it from me there will be mobilisation on the streets like there was in 2015 after Jilma won and it'll be very difficult for an Adagio administration to govern but unfortunately I don't think it will be as difficult for Bolsonaro so I know I'm ending on a pessimistic note but my the spirit of my comments was not meant to be entirely pessimistic there are little kernels of optimism in there what I think this incredibly simplistic ideology is incapable of doing socially and there would be resistance to Bolsonaro administration too thanks thanks very much Anthony thanks to all our speakers so we now have some time for questions probably about 15 minutes so just indicate and I'll take you in turn yeah yeah go ahead we've got learning mics around so just wait for that hi my name is Gibson for one I could understand and excuse me if I quite get it wrong but we are facing a crisis of more of a democracy no matter what party make the way to the power we still have the same problems like 50 years ago so my question is is there a version of a representative democracy we are dealing with is there really democracy we have to democratise in what way you can do it okay I'll take a number of questions and then we'll get the panel to respond hi my name is Mark so you talked about how race and gender and class all intersect but I was wondering how age does how does age how different age is voting how is that intersecting with all this thanks is there any particular cause that you will apply to basically the right wing shift that has been happening in Latin America for the past couple of elections I mean without mentioning Mexico most of the countries now especially in South America actually have become right wing countries instead of the left wing governments that we saw at the beginning of this century so is there because of mismanagement on the left or is it because there are global causes that are actually pushing Latin America into a more right wing government or candidates in this new era thanks and then we'll have you over there as one or two speakers said a coup d'etat cannot be countered by simply following the rules of the constitution but then the question arises what kind of poeder popular can counter a coup d'etat and then secondly in the context where Bolsonaro represents any or all political activists on the left as a threat to the supposed national unity then how can that poeder popular break that narrative and attract people towards something hopeful rather than simply make themselves into higher profile targets for assassination thanks and down here over the last two hours we've been hearing a lot on how Bolsonaro might win or will win or could win do any of the panellists have any views on how Hadaj could pull off a comeback on the 28th of October okay great thanks and way to back up there hi I'm Tiago one of the thing that caught my attention during the results of the elections were the voting results of the main center right center right parties in the legislative side there was a drastic reduction of congressmen from PSTB and MDB and in the executive side Marina, Alcimine and Mayelis combined didn't get even 8% of the votes and taking a historical background these are the parties that embarked in the coup in 2016 and it also led this systematic campaign of criminalization of the left wing parties in Brazil so I'd like to comment on what do you think and how do you think was this role of these center wing parties in eroding the democracy in Brazil in these poor election results thanks so we'll take the woman down there over there no hi I'm Grace I'm doing my dissertation on comparing social movements in Brazil and I was wondering from your perspective how do you think the relationship between the state and different social movements in Brazil has evolved and do you think that social movements and their agendas evolve on themselves in the nuances in that kind of relationship okay thanks and over here thank you so Bolsonaro as of course you all know is very homophobic and I was just wondering what's the future of gay rights in Brazil if he does win thanks and then over here hello Danny from Albania we've been talking here and we see that it's a kind of a global trend that the bottom of the working poor are kind of hijacked from the right wing populism so it does hope any more lies in the polls and if it doesn't where does it lie great thanks and over there where's the mic I wanted to ask why do you think the coup only happened in 2016 if there were numerous flaws in the party and if the right wing opposition was prominent for a long time thank you thank you and over there hi so I was wondering because you seem to speak about the division that happens in the PT right now and my question is considering that Bolsonaro is clearly a terrible option and the PT is divided what does that say about the future of Brazil as a whole as a democracy and is that a greater issue than this election in fact that no candidate is perfect or no candidate is good to some extent worse and more aggravating and a bigger issue than the fact that Bolsonaro might win the election great thanks is a person over there hi thank you very much for that mine is a bit of a statement and I wonder if you guys agree or not so guess everyone realize here there's a massive polarization in Brazil right now my question is if there's a sense of self criticism not only for the parties but also from the people I myself and probably a lot of people here consider themselves center center left I guess or extreme left and let's keep moving up my question is this polarization could also be caused by us on a sense that especially through social media we see that our reactions towards the criticism from the other side is sometimes not engaging enough to critical we are not engaging the proper way we accuse them before understanding their needs I think Jonathan Pie I don't know how many of you know him mentioned something about that a couple of sort of results ago in Brexit and Trump where I think is also on us to understand that they might have some obviously we understand that we disagree completely with them but we lack a bit of engagement we lack a bit of critical understanding maybe we can engage with them a bit better if that's also on us that we are causing sort of this polarization thank you I would just like to know if you think that Operation Navajato ever had a real chance of changing the political culture in Brazil or if it was a political vessel all along to like stage a coup thanks hi you mentioned Steve Bannon and Cambridge Analytica I was also wondering if you could expand on that and if you could talk about other international actors in this whole crisis for example people say that Bolsonaro is the candidate of the financial system so any comment thanks so I'll go down there and then up there I was wondering more about how it was said that activism could be something that could happen in Brazil for the social movements that are threatened but basically since like 2015 I feel we see how many social movements have been organized on the internet and I was wondering if that's not only mostly now that we have the internet it feels like there's a circulation of information and social protest happening online but we don't really see a response from the government or any real effect and even with Bolsonaro him are still posting online and people who won't are and it's basically not a conversation that's happening that's having a response it's just a fight, a circulation of people fighting and being aggressive online no real and how can activism be effective if there's no response happening okay thanks and then up there yeah thinking about alternatives so someone was mentioning about the kind of mobilizations that are also happening like from the left like women's marchers or the strikes that are happening so I was wondering if you could say more about the kind of mobilizations that we can see from what we see today kind of revolutionary mobilizations that if they are any kind of possibility in today's Brazil thanks so we'll take a couple more questions two or three more questions and then we'll get the panel to come back yep and the woman at the back so that person over there hi I'm just wondering as part of I can't tell you I'm wondering as part of what people are saying about a disaffection with neoliberal institutions whether the media is one of those institutions and how we start kind of building a kind of media outside of a neoliberal kind of framework and I think this is a problem not just in Brazil but across the world where more and more people are feeling like they can't trust what is being put out there because of the institution and the way in which the media has been formed thanks hi if Bolsonaro was to be elected what would it mean for the regional dynamics especially in the context of much of the Latin American left talking about the end of the cycle just thinking about the shockwaves that could reverberate around the rest of the region I wondered if you could all comment on that thanks and then finally person at the back then hi we've been discussing throughout the day all of the different factors that explain the rise of Bolsonaro and the rise of Bosonist but how can you explain the gruesome acts of violence that are taking place in Brazil like the fact that you saw photos of people going into the electoral ballot with guns or that like capoeira master was stabbed 12 times yesterday for saying that he voted for the pity how can you explain this not just violence but disgusting violence like violence that goes along with what Alfredo said about this thing in Brazil where there is a showcase for violence every single day and people seem to like it and have a thrill for it thanks and thanks to everyone who has the question so we'll hear who wants to go first do you want to go in the order speaking or does anyone want to go ahead that's a lot here so I will not in three minutes please rise of violence Brazil is a violent society it has the mark of slavery and it is about that violence is about keeping order keeping people in their proper place and it is about responses to circumstances of exclusion and deprivation and it's about the number of other things as well but the violence that is orchestrated from the state or by social movements of the right is the violence of order and my view is a lot about the restoration of order order after the disorder of the years of the PT in power where you had poor people in high positions in government that's not the way the state is supposed to work you had a steering of mass mobilisations and you had redistribution of income you had recognition of citizenship for poorer people in the country that's not on that society was not built that way so it's not unexpected that there would be a violent response on the part of the far right that connects to the question about gay rights gay rights have advanced a lot in Brazil but they have advanced in heterogeneous ways particularly in urban areas particularly especially in the great in the larger cities in the country and that was accepted and embraced by a lot of the media but some of the mainstream media so you would have gay couples on television and you would have positive role models you would have the supreme court taking a very independently of congress that has been very conservative and increasingly so recent but the supreme court reinterpreting the constitution to allow same sex couples to get married to adopt children etc this created a disconnect between urban areas and more traditional rural areas it created a disconnect between what was seen on television and what was argued claimed to be correct by the evangelical churches in particular that have been growing enormously and that has been a problem in the election it has been a problem the problem of deviancy the problem of not knowing where you belong the problem of being too forward in a negative way that cannot be accepted so the future I imagine would be a lot of violence to put people back in the proper place and great difficulty to expand further the rights of citizenship across the spectrum of society move to the right in Latin America that has to do with the limitations of the previous models of the left wing or center left administrations their dependence on the primary commodity boom their reliance on foreign capital flows their inability or unwillingness to redistribute to redistribute assets but only to distribute the additional marginal income that was obtained through the commodity boom and once the global economy entered into crisis in 2007-2008 that model was going to collapse in Brazil this collapse came years later but it came through a range of economic policy mistakes that compounded the disaster and the economy absolutely could not adapt and that attempt at non-orthodox economic policies their failure and the consequences was pinned very firmly down to the PT they are not only corrupt they are also incompetent and this was another problem that the PT had and continues to have hopes to reverse narrow liberal authoritarianism that is a big problem the left goes through generations and these generations these configurations of left-wing movements depend on the form that the economy takes the form of representation of the working class they depend on circumstances of country and place the PT was the best form of representation for the Brazilian working class in the 1980s and 1990s to some extent it is no longer that I think that the time of the worker's party is passed and I think the time for a new type of political formation not a new political party that we here can organize and launch etc but the party that corresponds to the configuration of the Brazilian working class as it exists today and this is a process for the global left that is still very much in process of that is very much still in the process of being developed in the UK there's the Corbyn movement as a demonstration possible the Bernie Sanders campaign in the United States these are victories for this time the PT is a party of the previous time I do not think that it is possible for the PT to recover and win elections and govern the country as a whole what kind of popular power that will emerge out of the evolution of contemporary and current struggles in the country I cannot anticipate what's going to happen or how it's going to take time it's way too much to answer and I've said a lot of stuff with which I agree so I'll focus on one thing or another and I believe we managed to talk a lot here about politics without talking pretty much anything about party politics in congress etc so more day-to-day element of that and I think the cool why did it happen in 2016 was one of the questions and there is this element of the cool that it was a way of politicians to safeguard in their interests against Lavajat several different layers or dimensions of the cool but one of them was we need to close ranks we need to circle the wagons and protect ourselves and the way to do that was by changing the president and defending themselves and Timur was the man to do that he was associated behind the scenes he defended himself by defending in closing ranks sacrifice in one or another there is the economic dimension there is the crisis there's a lot of things but there's also at the very end the cool happens because a couple of people voted for the impeachment to happen and they voted because there was a way to save themselves and that was only a press and burn an issue for them when Lavajat had gone to a certain point they got afraid that it could increase to a very large extent so this dimension of the cool should not be forgotten and it does relate a lot to why the right wing parties were burned in this process they could no longer claim with any dimension of legitimacy that they were clean that they weren't involved in this it became blatant and people are not stupid they saw that they were involved in all of that and they fell with it yes I think that leads to two elements the other thing they want to say is state and social movement relations popular power longer term elements which is that's not for me for this space to determine what's going to be the form and the efficacy of resistance and hopefully advance in a progressive agenda but I do find it very unlikely that it won't be a heterogeneous movement that it won't be something that collates and organizes groups that are from different traditions if you look at what's happening in Brazil in the recent times the most excited movement the most efficacious ones have been rather disparate but able to connect to an extent so the black movement has increased a lot in Brazil recently feminist movements urban squads and they are all to an extent however you want to understand this word intersectional, they talk about class gender race together and they advance the struggle they haven't been able to coalesce to a national force yet that's probably in the making and in order to be efficacious it will have to have a different relationship to state power than the ones that the PT tried to foster this whole idea that was popular in Latin America for a while that the parties should govern by obeying is something that has to be brought back into the discussion I don't think anyone has found a solution to that but it's through experimenting in this way that there is some hope let's hope it comes soon I will start some thoughts about the issue of age which is really interesting in the elections so what I noticed when looking at the profile of protestors between 2013 and 2016 and if you're interested in some really good opinion polls available during the demonstrations looking at who demonstrated in these various different movements and if you look at the pro-impeachment demonstrations they were dominated by people men in their late 40s and early 50s who had a reasonable level of income and education and I think this is also if you look at opinion poll breakdowns for Bolsonaro this is also some of the core vote for Bolsonaro and and that was really fascinating in the last few weeks there has been in the polls which are obviously not entirely accurate but they indicated trends towards larger support for Bolsonaro among young people so 16 to 24 age group which is surprising I think and something to think about and also among women so this was one of the very shocking results after the women's demonstrations that has happened but at the same time among young people we can see lots of interesting mobilisations again like the school occupations which captures this same age group of course also the participation of young women in the women's demonstrations the fights for rights in that area so I think age is a really important factor of some very interesting trends in various directions so another question that I want to look at is what about centre-right parties so it's very clear that the MDB and the PSDB have lost a lot of support so compared to the PT which has lost seats in congress that it hasn't imploded as much as the established centre-right parties so they are clearly also facing a crisis of votes going to Bolsonaro instead of them and it could well have something to do with a certain perception of hypocrisy around impeachment and corruption that these politicians were also obviously part of that but managed to escape to some extent from prison and finally social movements so the social movements were like the unions were also relatively slow in responding to the protests and mass demonstrations but they have become again the more established movements have become part of the forefront of the protests in recent years so you can see the MST and the MTSD in big protests and demonstrations and they have a bit of a problem there because they are to some extent particularly the unions in this case are defending the status quo and also defending democracy at the same time so it's not a popular position of course to defend the PT governments or defend Petrobras so it's a very kind of tricky position to be in to shift that kind of protagonism to more a different perspective I think has happened I think the women's demonstrations are a different proposition in this scenario but it's impossible to answer them all but I hope that in the process we are sort of getting there a very old friend of mine told me the following this is in response to Alfredo he said I told him the Labour Party was quite an interesting party although it had tremendous difficulties and he said you have to understand he said that the Labour Party is part of European Social Democracy but there is a difference European Social Democracy emerged as a revolutionary organisation and then it degenerated the Labour Party was born degenerated don't quote me on this this is what my friend said so the point I'm trying to make here is now we are the Labour Party and we have Corbyn the Corbyn phenomenon classes do not abandon their battlehorses that quickly so I think perhaps we need to discuss more and it's too premature to draw too many conclusions regarding the capacities and the potential electorally as well as politically of the workers party think back only a few years when Tony do you know what I mean when Tony Blair was in charge and organised participated the most disgusting invasion of Iraq and so on who would have actually encouraged anybody to join that party today there are millions hundreds of thousands of people who are joining so the workers party is going through a bad patch at the moment but I think it's too premature maybe at the end of the day the day is great but I think at this stage where we are today before the second round is too premature to draw that conclusion what I want to concentrate on very briefly before the chair tells me of governability because we can speculate how exactly we know we want to do that because we want to see how things are going to pan out so it's a good exercise but we cannot speculate too much exactly as to what is going to happen in every possible area but it seems to me there is one important dimension in the question of governability if we are to judge the programme of Bolsonaro not necessarily by its discourse but by the economic policies that will be implemented brutally because that's the nature of the beast and that's what the elite actually wants this is the conclusion the culmination or an element of the culmination of the coup that began in 2000 which is to complete the institutionalisation of neoliberalism forever then that will make the situation very ungovernable and that in the context of the old traditional parties were quite skillful you know for example is one of those who was able to transform himself into anything literally every single week and he was quite skillful at that and he knew Marxism he got inflation sorted and so on so you need that sort of thing in order to actually have governability and I don't think they are going to have that and therefore the question is that somebody asked I think it was a colleague over there you know is there any chance that Haddad may come back Haddadji may come back well if and this is again a sort of speculation if Ciro Gomes had not stood as a candidate I had declared himself what he's done now before for Haddadji then I think Haddadji would have been in the region of 40, 40 plus easily so when the final result would have been counter the dramatic effect wouldn't have been that great in that case it would have been everything to play for and people were saying with that candidate I'm sure we can win it and more important than in terms of the PT winning election not winning elections Hadlula being the president the PT would have won so therefore still you know everything to play for if I were to advise the PT which I want because you know they know what they're doing and it's not my job to tell them what to do but if I were them I would fight for every single vote as many as possible regardless of what you think you're not going to win the more you win the more chances you have to actually have good basis for resistance because that's where it's coming and the final point is literally in 30 seconds the question of the regional dynamics which I think is quite an important question Macri in Argentina was telegenic he was handsome he could dance in public he had a very good simple program of everything now in one year and a half he has made Argentina going into debt from 150 million dollars into 157 billion one and a half year that should go in the book the Guinness Book of Records in one and a half year and poverty has increased more than two million the country is in a state of collapse and everybody is saying people who I know in Argentina are telling me I don't think it's likely that he's going to finish his administration and I understand there is a helicopter on top of the White House on top of the Casa Rosada on the way when the masses get going so if that is what neoliberalism can produce in such a short period of time Argentina's substantially smaller than Brazil then you can imagine what it is and this is connected to the question of the United States if the United States which is in my view the driving force intellectually, politically and in many other ways I'm sure we haven't got the declassified documents yet the only thing they can offer is that sort of macro type of program you know with a lot of repression a lot of exclusion a lot of brutality and the economy in state of collapse including affecting massively the middle classes somebody at Bolsonaro who is a bit more extreme is going to perhaps less than that so there is everything to play for and the only way to fight against a dictatorship is when I came from one when I survived one which is you have to go into battle you have to organize a strike you have to think very carefully how you do it but you can't defeat them we defeated Pinochet so it can be done and I'm sure that with the element of very weak governability that Bolsonaro has I think we have tremendous possibilities so let's fight this one let's wait for the 28 and then prepare ourselves ready because life is going to become extremely interested in Brazil thank you just a few quick comments before we begin to chat outside the auditorium the scenario I think for Adagio winning involves maybe a hope that this is like the second round of the French election in 2002 where a lot of people said anybody but Le Pen and you got lots of people who are saying to themselves in Brazil I don't really want the PT to come back but I can't vote for this guy who said all of these things and you can look them up, all these abhorrent comments the difference maybe though between 2002 in France and 2018 in Brazil is that you've got quite a few market actors saying oh yeah he's offensive but we're going to make money with him in power and you've also got PSDB, I just read a piece a few days ago by a PSDB political scientist saying concluding in a very kind of odd rationalization that the PT represented a bigger threat to democracy than Bolsonaro and that's, you know he's not alone in the PSDB of thinking that way and so it won't take very many people in the PSDB or who voted for Ciro to migrate to Bolsonaro and get him the 4% that he needs to go over the top so I think it's far fetched but it could happen on the the center-right contributing to the decline of democracy I think that's a good point I mean the PSDB did worse than this election in the PT they didn't win any governerships in the first round they were in sixth in the second round and you know they did I think they did contribute I mean everyone shares some of this blame but I mean in 2014 with the PSDB formally challenged the election results without any real evidence and a year later they admitted there was no evidence that the election had been fraudulent but they contested it and that's a bad precedent for democracy to say that the election results are not legitimate if you have no evidence it's the kind of thing that Bolsonaro would do as well so there has been a decline of institutions and that leads to the other point about how to defend a democracy I think you try to use the institutions that are there, the vertical and horizontal accountability mechanisms I mean I know that sounds a bit desperate Diastafoli now is the guardian of democracy the Supreme Court has functioned it's a very erratic institution but that is a place where you could possibly check some of what a Bolsonaro administration would do and you also have invertible accountability as mobilization it's challenging through protests and strikes and so on on the self criticism point I think that's a good point I think all actors need to be reflective need to think about I mean there's been plenty of that here on this panel I think criticisms of what the workers party did in power for example I often encounter people in Brazil in left parties who kind of have a knee jerk reaction to evangelicals they're all neoliberals, they're all brainwashed there's no point in reaching out to them my own experience is that that's not really the case my first research in Brazil was in the northeast amongst rural trade unionists and quite a few of the people in rural trade unions at that time were evangelicals and they were not straight down the line they had nuanced views about politics and if you condemn that group of people then you really cede them to the other side you need to be engaged and be open and talk to people about what they're concerned about and not have kind of defensive prejudgements about where people might go politically it's interesting Adagio discourse on this he criticizes the conviction of Lula of course but he defends Lavajatu and there's a lot to be said for the idea that the powerful should be accountable to the judicial system and Lavajatu has caught up more than just PT politicians you've seen Eduardo Cunha go to jail you've seen Cabral go to jail and it's understandable that there's a lot of support for that because for so long Brazilians got used to the idea of one rule for the powerful and one rule for the rest of us and this is a challenge to that I think unfortunately, and again it's a conclusion I don't have any great delight in making but without a lot of other reforms I don't see Lavajatu being able to move Brazilian politics to a new equilibrium so it would be interesting to see what happens to the anti-corruption discourse of a Bolsonaro administration if a lot of his people get caught up in corruption which we would expect them to do given the incentives it will also be interesting to see what happens to Michel Temer after he steps down he seems supremely relaxed about not being president I don't know why he's right to retire someone made a point about how to build alternative media I think this is a great point because I think the PT in power lost the battle of ideas when it tried to make the case that some amount of social regulation and social control of the media was important they lost that because the media as they did here after the Levinson inquiry just said any attempt to regulate us is destroying the freedom of the press and leading to the path leading to totalitarianism and they couldn't really win that argument and so I think given the fact they haven't won that argument what progressives have as an alternative is guerrilla media their own social media Steve Bannon is very good at this I don't know anyone on the progressive side who's as good but that's probably where people have to go not expect to be able to win the battle at the state level and get regulation but simply create alternatives through the grassroots through the use of social media and on the region I think it's a good point if Bolsonaro wins he will embolden imitators in the region we've got Duterte in the Philippines we've got Orban in Hungary I mean this is a sort of these guys these guys tend to like each other and follow each other and there will be a regional and global impact if the 28th ends up in a Bolsonaro victory thanks thanks Anthony, thanks to all our speakers and thanks to everyone for coming just to say the next seminar will be the same place, same time Tuesday the 16th of October at 5pm and we'll be hearing from Alberto Toscano on the invention of the savage philosophy, politics and the ideologies of development and everyone is welcome to reception on the first floor in the SCR thanks everyone