The time has come for the sacrosanct alternation.

(originally published in Major Card)

Here, there, and everywhere, people talk about the need for alternation. About the importance of alternation. About its urgent necessity. After all, twelve years of the same party in power erode expectations and possibilities. Twelve years of the same party in power open up possibilities for irreparable deviations. Twelve years of the same party in power cause inevitable weariness among the people and lead to the fatigue of a material of immeasurable value: hope.

It could be, it could be. The problem is something else: behind the alternation lies something more than just replacing one party with another. In reality, it's about replacing one government project with another. And it is at this point that we must analyze the scenario, taking into account something essential: over the last twelve years, Brazil has been living, more than a government project, a national project.

So, the alternation now being demanded concretely means replacing the project that is being carried out with another one.

This is the biggest visible risk on the horizon. First of all, however, I want to make it clear that I am not and have never been affiliated with the Workers' Party. In fact, I have never accepted any affiliation: I'm not even a member of Fluminense (a Brazilian football club).

Furthermore, I have irreconcilable disagreements with the PT (Workers' Party), both regarding its methods and conduct, as well as its sectarianism and, in more than one aspect, its Olympian arrogance.

None of this, however, prevents me from seeing the obvious: over these last twelve years, my country has changed. And, pay attention: it has changed its appearance, but it has also changed its body and content. These were not twelve years of cosmetic changes: they were years of concrete change, which, if not yet structural, is the most consistent since the distant years of the Vargas Era.

It was from 2003 onwards that real possibilities for profound and, in some respects, radical change opened up. It's unnecessary to reiterate here how much remains to be done and how much needs to be corrected. It's urgent to change certain courses so as not to lose our way. But, as the wise man at the corner pastry stand used to say, one thing is one thing, and another thing is another thing.

Asking for and demanding changes and corrections within a project that is effectively changing the social reality of the country is one thing. Defending the sacrosanct alternation of power simply for the sake of alternation is quite another.

To begin with, what is the alternative to the project that is currently underway? What alternative do the other two candidacies represent?

One of them, Aécio Neves's, is quite clear and, in many respects, sincere: to go back. To return to something very similar to what Fernando Henrique Cardoso's government was like from the moment he allowed himself to be seduced by the allure of reelection.

A curious, albeit sincere, alternative: at this point, to resume a process interrupted in 2002 precisely by the proposal for social change in the country. To return to their altars all the saints of the ineffable market, to resume the ceremony of worshiping private enterprise, to sacralize a petty system.

In other words: to return tens of millions of Brazilians who emerged from the shadows of hopelessness and a dead-end future, to the limbo to which they have been relegated for centuries. To convince them once again that that life of humiliation is their destiny, and not the result of an unjust system built to benefit the usual beneficiaries and relegate the usual relegated to oblivion.

The other alternative is more difficult to debate, for two reasons. First, because nobody knows for sure what Marina Silva and her occasional associates are proposing, if they are proposing anything at all. They want, says the messianic figure, to change everything that is there and establish the reign of the new. How to do this, and especially what exactly is the novelty they will bring, nobody knows.

And secondly, because between comings and goings, between affirmations and denials, it becomes impossible – at least for me – to understand what she says or thinks she says when she speaks.

The three paths open to the Brazilian voter are these: a return to the past, a leap into the abyss of contradictions, incongruity and inconsistency, or improving what has been and is being done.

Aécio Neves, with his weak rhetoric, at least proposes something tangible. Marina Silva is a factory of platitudes that would be innocuous if they didn't conceal a truth: what would apply in a potential government of hers would be exactly the same economic creed that the PSDB candidate assumes in a clearer and more loyal way. And with an added danger: a blatant neoliberalism embedded in a crazy project.

The discourse of alternation makes sense when it comes to replacing something that clearly doesn't work with another viable project for the future.

In the case of these elections, what is being proposed to the electorate is to alternate between what, despite the need for improvement, has concretely changed the country, and a return to darkness.

This is the real proposition made to the voter: to choose between the future and the past, between social justice and a return to humiliating inequalities, between a reality that needs to be corrected and a hopeless deception.