As facções na política e a ameaça para as eleições

It is not easy, as several jurisdictions have discovered in recent years to campaign little-own-win against seething right-wing populists. Such movements, parties and leaders rarely burden themselves with facts or scruples, and in many places have found grounds for confidence that many voters don't care. They are even harder to defeat once in government, where they can enact a program of state capture, toppling free media, sub-orning judiciary, weaponizing police, terrorizing business. But it turns out they can be beaten. In Serbia's parliamentary election last weekend, the Conservative coalition led by the Serbian Progressive Party of former President Alexander Vucic, who was seeking to reposition himself as Prime Minister, was routed by a new force student list, which grew from the enormous protests aroused two years ago by the collapse of an ill-maintained railway station in Novi Sad. This comes six months after the similarly seismic election in Serbia's neighbour Hungary, assumed to be a state thoroughly captured by Putinist Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and his Fidesz party, who were nevertheless turfed unceremoniously out. And though Brazil's recent presidential election was one, eventually, by its incumbent, President Luis Enatheo Lula de Silva's unlikely triumph can also be counted as a similar sort of victory, given that the alternative was a return to the paranoid culture wars of a rabble rouse at named Bolsonaro. Serbia, Hungary and Brazil are obviously different countries in different situations, but their recent elections will all be keenly studied for lessons in seeing off populists. One sobering similarity is that all three countries have very recent experience of being governed by leaders and parties of this ilk. Maybe people do have to learn the hard way that electing demagogues, showvenists, grifters, and crooks is unlikely to furnish happy outcomes. But maybe not, while it does remain very much to be seen if Hungary and Serbia's new governments can deliver on their optimistic promises, or if an 81-year-old Lula can get much done, constructed by a hostile, resentful Congress, there does appear to be a certain undefiable power to the idea that it doesn't have to be like this. Where did it all go wrong for Eastern Europe's authoritarian strongmen and for the son of Brazil's? What does it take to retake a captured state? And how do you get people to believe there is an alternative? This is the foreign desk. At some point I would say that they even lost control of the campaign. Defenders started working, organizing rallies in the streets, defending Lula independently of the campaign. I think that was probably the key of this campaign, that it was never attacking campaign. It was very positive campaign, it was the campaign of promising better future. Fidesz was very strong in classical propaganda, public media, television, but hundreds of thousands were following my daughter's campaign on daily basis on his social media. It was like a real-like show. You're listening to the foreign desk with me, Andrew Muller. Our first guest is Lesandra Paragwalsu, Reuters reporter based in Brazil, covering President Lula, who had looked well and truly out for the count after the first round of voting in Brazil's presidential election, but somehow scraped himself off the mat to land and knock out blow upon his opponent, Senator Flavio Bolsonaro, son of imprisoned former president Jaya Bolsonaro. Lesandra, let's start with what I guess is the big question, which is, do we yet understand what happened between rounds one and two? We're trying to, yes, I think it's a combination of factors, it was not only one thing. Well, the president took his care after the first round, he was not expecting to lose to Flavio Bolsonaro, and then he'd shake the campaign and shake his convictions. So, he'd change everything, he added more people, younger people to his campaign, but also there was a society movement, there was not only from the campaign. People went to the streets, people started to organize themselves on social media, you know, on Monday, there was a student in the streets protesting against Flavio. So, this sentiment, this feeling of that Flavio could be bad for Brazil, could be bad for democracy, he started to grow in the society, and they worked with that, and they started working with social media that is something that the campaign wasn't doing well, and in a country that is chronically online as Brazil, that was a problem for them. So, did it seem in that interval between rounds one and two, like it was almost an organic popular movement that actually kind of took Lula and his campaign by surprise? Yes, at some point I would say that they even lost control of the campaign, you know, and it was a good feeling, it was not a bad thing, because people started doing things for them, for the campaign, for Lula, and calling him. There was rallies in almost every capital city in Brazil, and most of them didn't even have Lula, people started organizing themselves, we have something in Brazil that I don't know if you have an England, but it's called "Defendums", it's the group of, yeah, defendums, they started working, and organizing rallies in the streets, defending Lula, independently of the campaign. Did it seem to you, though, like these gatherings, these demonstrations were primarily in favor of Lula or primarily against Bolsonaro? I would say it's a mix of both things, yes, but maybe it is more against Bolsonaro, yeah. And that was the thing that the campaign knew how to work, they work on this, this fear of what Bolsonaro could mean to Brazil. So they got this sentiment and they feel it, and then there was this idea that, well, his father attempted a coup in Brazil. His father's government was very bad for part of the society, he was very bad at demonstrating the really pandemic, they cut pensions, they cut the minimum wage, so they started working on these fears of the population. So many people voted for Lula in Brazil, not because they were voting for him, they're voting for against Bolsonaro, and voting was the idea that we need to have an election in 2030, Lula won't be in the ballot because she says her last election, and we have a chance to have someone else that's not from Bete, and it's not from Bolsonaro. I mean, did Bolsonaro make significant mistakes between the two rounds of voting, did he just perhaps communicate a sense that he'd already won it? Yeah, especially in the first week, he was acting like he had already won the election, and he was not wrong to assume that because in 1998, when Brazil approved the election, someone that finished behind the first round would be able to overcome that on the round off, the candidate that finished in first round won the election, and so it was something that was very difficult for Lula. People were saying that if he would pull off, it would be kind of a miracle, and so in the first week, he was talking about with other parties to invite them to his government, and he kind of left the campaign, and then came this wave of people supporting Lula from the streets and in social media, and I cannot leave out a representative called Andrei Janonis, that became famous in Europe right now, that organized this digital warme, and what's up, that is something that every Brazilian use, he got more than 10 million people working for the campaign digitally, changing the algorithm, changing the views and Lula spaces, and expanding massively the reach of the left, something that they never could do before, that was a place that was totally occupied by the right in Brazil, so he lost his first week talking about his future government, and they lost space on social media. Well, just finally then, now that Lula has accomplished, pulled off his miracle and will get another term, and Senator Bolsonaro appears to be sulking in the United States, isn't clear how much actual governing Lula will be able to do, because although he is president, elections in the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate went very, very well for the Bolsonaroists, indeed, also for quite a lot of other actual Bolsonaro's. So he will be governing with a popular mandate, but against a very hostile Congress. How difficult is that going to be? It's probably going to be very difficult because it was not easy to his first mandate now, and the Congress was not so strongly for Bolsonaro. He won't have an easy life. But the fact that Flave fled to the US left his party, a little bit lost right now, they don't have a strong name in the Bolsonaro family to lead this. He's saying he can't lead the opposition from the US, but of course he's not the same. And one sign that this won't be working well for him, is the fact that the other parties on the center right are already talking to Lula, already saying they accept the results of the election, they accept the democracy, and so Lula has the opportunity to build some bridge with these other parties. Still, he will have to negotiate every bit of every policy you need to pass to Congress. That was Lissandra Paragrasu with Reuters in Brazil. One of the purposes of state capture is to make any other government, or any other kind of government, seem not only impossible, but unimaginable. Serbia's politics had been dominated for more than a decade by Alexander Vuchich and/or the Serbian Progressive Party. Their vanquishing by a movement which did not formally exist two years ago is extraordinary, but not entirely without precedent. In 2000, Vuchich's mentor, President Slobodan Molosevic, was chased out of office by a revolt spearheaded by the student activists of Otpo. Joining us now from Belgrade is Drugana Obridovich, Serbian Director of BIRN, the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network. Drugana, let's start with a very basic question, especially those who may be coming a new to new developments in Serbian politics. How would you go about explaining who and what the student list is? Not easy. First of all, we should make distinction between student movement and student list. Student movement is the movement that kind of emerged after huge tragedy that had happened in November, 2024, after the canopy of the newly renovated train station in Novissad, the second biggest city in Belgrade collapsed and killed 16 people. And basically, student movement emerged after they're asking for accountability. But then the government didn't respond to this call for accountability and they started protest. And by the end of November, we already had student movement throughout the entire country. So I think that tragedy was catalyzing movement for the student movement. But their first demand was not for elections and not for political change. It was more for accountability and fight against the corruption. The fact is that we had such a corrupt and autocratic government that they could not respond to that request. Basically, the response was violence. They started beating students in the streets. Basically, I think that this reaction, this physical violence and complete denial of any accountability, like political accountability for that event, later on, built up this demand for political change and for elections. This is not the first time this century that we've seen a large student movement in Serbia moving against an authoritarian government. And with some success, I can remember being in Belgrade in around 2000 reporting on Opor, which was the movement of the time, which I guess led the revolution, which eventually overthrew Slobodan Milosevic, but Opor tried to transform into a political party. They ran in 2003 and pulled less than 2% of the vote. So what was different about this movement? What was the, who led the process to turn it from student protests into not just a political party, but the next government of Serbia? Exactly. I think probably underlying reason is that there is no political ambition within most of the people that are involved in this movement and in the student list, because student movement generated into the student list, which doesn't have any student on it. These are the people that students basically said we trust these people and we are nominating these 250 people to represent us in this country in the next parliament. So on that list, you have professionals of different kinds like doctors, teachers, agricultural workers, artists and so on, but most of these people actually are academics and university professors. So people that stood by the students during their fight and the students knew quite personally knew that they don't have any, let's say, personal political agendas, like most of the people that are on the list are unknown to the public, that are people that were never before publicly exposed, like most of them, majority of them. So I think that also helped within the people in Serbia to gain trust in the list and the movement, because after 15 years of very autocratic government that sucked out like all political life from the public space and basically managed to persuade people that politics is a dirty business if somebody else tries to do it, and that everybody who goes into politics except for them has some secret hidden agenda. Is it clear yet which demographics in Serbia, the student list most appeal to? Is this a generational thing? Is it a big cities versus small towns and rural villages thing? Because clearly there were people who did turn out to vote for the incumbent government. So as you see it, where is that divide now? Well, I would say like a student list won this election by such a big majority that effectively it means that it penetrated all demographics, also if we look at all the big cities in Serbia it completely demolished the ruling party. The only places where the ruling party got some majority are actually underdeveloped rural areas with probably like older, older demography, but then I would say like all variety of people from different professions voted for the student list because they kind of recognized it as a genuine thing. Also, we should understand like what is the moment in which this entire change happened and it happened after many years of different like uprisings and a protest that started in early 2020s, they had a serious big demonstrations coming like every year on different topic whether it was ecological demonstrations and movements, whether it was the movement against the violence and so on and so forth. So I think like momentum was building over the time and student movement actually grew from something that was concentrated on universities growing to like a social movement. So they managed under that umbrella to collect all the people that had their grievances with the government and they were definitely many of them. So it didn't matter if people are from the left or right or central ideological group or whether they're coming from big cities or small places in Serbia, everybody agreed that corruption in Serbia is so overwhelming that it penetrated like every poor of society and their everyday lives. That's finally then though, how did they go about getting that message out? Because obviously one of the things they would have been running against is the extent to which so much of the civic institutional structure of Serbia had been captured by the ruling government, including Serbia's media, some of whom we've actually heard apologizing in the last few days for the way they had allowed themselves to be captured. Nevertheless, that's what student lists had to run against. How did they do it? say unconventional approach to it. First of all, their campaign mostly was field campaign. They were like a foot soldiers going through the country to every village, every place like there were these big student marches organized. They were going to the people that otherwise wouldn't have seen them, except from the propaganda that was spread from public TV. The other important channel was basically social media. These are all young people. They're digital natives for them. It was natural to run campaigns on social media, and they were so good at it. So that definitely mobilized a lot of people. Then also a handful of still free media in Serbia. They are, I would say, only a few, but then quite powerful. And then they have a strong voice also to mobilize the international community. We managed to mobilize also. They asked for a quite a lot. And I would say that was the crucial. It was very much a direct campaign, not using so much traditional communication channels, but going where people are being present in the streets, basically spreading very positive messages. I think that was probably the key of this campaign that it was never attacking campaign. It was very positive campaign. It was the campaign of promising better future. It just-- it goes with the young people, with the youth, to believe that something better is possible, and that the better future is coming. So that is the message that they convey to the rest of the country. That was Dregana Oberdovic. The BIRN's Serbia Director, this is the Foreign Desk. This is the Foreign Desk on Monical Radio. Finally, on today's show to Hungary, now nearly six months into a post-victor-orban era that seemed like it would never arrive, until it did. Joining us from Budapest is Susana Zeleni, director of the Democracy Institute Leadership Academy at the Central European University, and author of Tainted Democracy, Victor Orban, and the Subversion of Hungary. Susana, first of all, to the title character of your book, where did it all go wrong for Victor Orban? Well, there were plenty of reasons why Orban could stay on power so long and why he couldn't stay longer. He could stay long because he captured the Hungarian state rather easily, 16 years ago. He was really the first one in Europe who could capture the institution system top-down with his supermajority in parliament without much response for many years from Hungary's allies, and also this is paralyzed, this paralyzed Hungarian opposition as well. So he could capture it very fast and quickly, very efficiently. He was also receiving a fabulous amount of EU funds. In the first 10 years of Orban's rule, Hungary received like 4% to 6% of GDP per year from the EU. But at the same time, he was also massively abusing the power, a huge amount of rent seeking. So money left the public coffers to private pockets. So the corruption, the systemic corruption that Orban developed and institutionalized was for many Hungarians for a long time unseen until actually, after the second term of Orban, it became really exponential. So basically, post 2022, everything's starting to show its real face. So Orban's days were actually counted. We didn't know how long he could still keep on with the captured state and he could gain another couple of years. But actually, the Hungarian society was pretty ready for change already in 2022. - That state capture that you described, though, obviously part of the reason for it was to entrench Orban and entrench Fidesz and make challenges to him more and more difficult. - So is there a simple way to explain how Peter Magger got around that? Was it just a question of pointing out to the Hungarian people what had actually happened? - So the thing is that, as I said, there was already a massive opposition against Orban in 2022. It's also important to know that the Hungarian electoral system is greatly disproportionate. So Orban won super majority, 67% of the mandates and the Hungarian election who's were changed like 30 times during 16 years. So at every each election, Fidesz, because they had constitutional majority, they could constantly adjust the election rules in order that it serves Fidesz Orban's party. So it was very complicated to go against Magger or Orban. But people really wanted some change. So after the opposition lost, which was not very well organized back then, a loss in 2022, people completely turned away from the opposition and they were just waiting for someone coming. So that was the environment where Magger could enter at the moment when Orban went into one of his own traps, a scandal, the president pardoned someone who was related to a pedophile case in a country which was all about family and children and Christianity. So this issue was a blowing momentum and this made Magger an opportunity to just come to public. And because he was a former Fidesz person, so he actually defected from his own party. He had a lot of internal information. So his appearance and criticism of Orban seemed to people very, very legitimate. He could gather a lot of attention and a lot of sympathy right from the beginning because people knew that going against Orban is actually dangerous. So he made a lot of self-sacrifice and I think this gave him a lot of more weight. How important was the way that Peter Magger campaigned, though, because some of those decisions that you mentioned that Orban made are very much, I think, symptomatic of somebody who has been in unchallenged power for far too long and has become detached from the reality on the ground, doesn't really understand the country. He's governing anymore. This happens to all authoritarians eventually. So did it make a big difference that Peter Magger's approach was to hit the road and just travel absolutely relentlessly all over Hungary to big cities, medium-sized cities, small towns and villages, talking to anybody who would listen to him? Absolutely. So Magger made very smart steps when he entered the scene. First of all, he openly challenged Orban and he announced that he want to defeat him. So he could grasp and gather all the support from all the people who voted ever against Orban because he wanted to change the system. So that was very interesting. So what he had to do is to gain support from those who were still somewhat pro-Orban voters. That was a big challenge for him because, of course, Orban was fascinating also in campaign machinery. So Fidesz was a very robust system, institutionalized a lot of people, a lot of money, a lot of money for people for activists. So that was the big thing what Magger did that when he went to this middle size and smaller settlements. And he had to just take 10%, 15%, 10%, 15% of traditional Orban voters. And then this is how he got actually the majority because, you know, in a majoritarian electoral system, a little difference can make big change. We were just as a final thought on that because what we're trying to understand is how one overcomes a semi-authoritarian state that has been substantially captured by one party. You mentioned earlier that Magger was a former member of Fidesz and a former ally of Orban. Usually, I think people think the most obvious way to challenge a far right party, which I think Fidesz, you could say, had become, is to challenge them from the left. Is there actually an argument though that there perhaps more vulnerable from the center right? - Yeah, well, I think this is a very important kind of lesson learned from Hungary that when the public is so incredibly divided, it's not necessarily easy to come from the other side. It's more really identified from the other side, which Orban's propaganda machinery demonstrated that the other side is actually evil. It's an enemy should be defeated than a lot of people who, would not specifically like Fidesz, but just didn't think that the others are good enough, or thought that they are evil, they needed someone who seemed to be in the middle. So actually, Maja during the campaign, he said he is in the center. It was also interesting that he distanced himself from the opposition, from the liberal left opposition, which was pretty small, actually, but not by the voters. So people like this, people like to vote for people who say that they are not radicals either or the other say. So he positioned himself to the center, and often many things what he did symbolically was actually similar, what he learned in Fidesz. For example, he went everywhere with the Hungarian flag. He used a lot of national symbols, which liberal opposition did not do before, because the idea was that it was captured by Fidesz, but Maja didn't mind it. It was natural for him, but he promised democracy, he promised change. He went very bravely against Orban, and Orban's family as the most corrupt dynasty in Hungary over the time. He used a lot of everyday issues in his campaign. So when he went to a small town where only 3,000 people lived and no one ever saw any living politician, then he appeared there, but it was on his social media. It was like a real like show. So it was a lot of fun to train. So thousands and hundreds of thousands were following Maja's campaign on daily basis on his social media. And this is, for example, something Fidesz completely lost. Fidesz was very strong in classical propaganda, public media, television, influencers. They paid a lot of influencers, but they really lost content to people, and actually Fidesz believed until election night that they could still win. So they really miscalculated their chances. Susanna Zalani, director of the Democracy Institute Leadership Academy at the Central European University, and author of Tainted Democracy, Victor Orban, and the Subversion of Hungary. Thanks for joining us. That's it for this episode of The Foreign Desk. We'll be back next week and look out for the Foreign Desk Explaner available every Wednesday. The Foreign Desk was produced by Anita Riota and Lily Austin. Lily also produces The Foreign Desk Explaner. To contact the Foreign Desk team, you can email Anita at [email protected] and don't forget to subscribe to Monical Magazine and to our free daily email bulletins by heading to our website at monical.com. For me, Andrew Muller, thanks very much for listening. Until next time, goodbye.