Battles we avoid are still ours; never

In 2014, the PT (Workers' Party) will have to win battles, some of which it has chosen to avoid over the past 12 years; the victory in what will be the mother of them all depends on the courage to face these battles: the defense of the dignity of this country, which we have been building with great difficulty. In a way, Churchill's aphorism about peace with Hitler, proposed and signed by Chamberlain shortly before the outbreak of the conflict of unpredictable proportions for the time, and which that act sought to avoid, is relevant – between dishonor and war, there will always be those who choose the former. However, one should not confuse facing these great battles with foolish radicalization or any kind of contribution to poisoning the country's political environment; our campaign is precisely on the opposite front, that of prophylaxis against the poison inoculated by the sycophants of the most cretinous right wing on Earth directly upon the hopes of a significant portion of the Brazilian people.

The appropriate strategy, in my opinion, is to expose the inconsistencies and lack of a plan in the right-wing opposition – easy enough, so far – but taking into account that polarization in this dispute no longer makes much sense in the minds of many Brazilians. For what is hope – and what we should fear, yes – to regain meaning, the differences between the projects being contested must become apparent; for this, the first major battle to be won is the apathy of the new generations towards political action itself. The demoralization of politics and political parties promoted over these years corresponded to a thesis and a meaning: the most identifiable ideology among those available in the post-transition period was that of the PT (Workers' Party), and also the one most identified with ideas of change; to deconstruct politics, in a context where the most prestigious political project among the population was the PT, was to deconstruct the PT. Thus, the "depoliticization of politics" has been the great bet of the right-wing opposition in these 12 years of PT government.

To reclaim the space for politics in social relations and to put forward an advanced agenda that includes both social participation and political reform is also the best way to engage with social segments that are no longer content to simply act in the background defending good public policies, but who want to act strategically in defining the country's direction. It is necessary to reclaim spaces for consensus-building, value them, and decisively encourage popular participation. Without the appropriation of politics by new generations, we are doomed to failure, and that is only a matter of time. On the other hand, without real agendas being opened up, without fear and by all possible means, this appropriation is impossible. More than the country it found and transformed in these 12 years, the PT (Workers' Party) must convince people of the kind of country it wants to build for the next twenty. Not in simplistic terms, not with the lack of imagination that has characterized our proposals in recent years; it must be the first to proclaim, in these elections, the end of a virtuous cycle and propose the beginning of a new cycle of more profound changes.

This is not a war between advertisers and marketers, but a crucial moment when the country must decide what it wants to be and what to do with the policies that have promoted the inclusion of millions in our domestic consumer market. Like any election, this one will be won by whoever appropriates and identifies with a set of symbols with which the majority of Brazilians also want to identify; what we can no longer do is, in the name of alliance politics, insist on engaging with common sense without offering any critical content as a counterpoint, at the risk of becoming hostages to certain backwardness, as we partly were in 2010. This must be an election focused on the big issues: structural reforms, Brazil's role in the world, the foundations of a development project that is sustainable in the long term.

The right-wing opposition is unprepared for these issues because it has no affinity with any of them; it is a narrow-minded political group prone to certain aristocratic outbursts, faithful both to its oligarchic origins, when it suggests the idea of ​​predestination of "political heirs" or believes it is capable of re-enacting the "coffee-with-milk" politics, and to its UDN (National Democratic Union) genealogy, when it makes anti-corruption discourse its highest banner – true as its commitment to democracy, as evidenced by its interruptions at crucial moments, and always through coups, in any agenda that represented the breaking of privileges and the advancement of citizenship. There is no "modern" right wing in Brazil; our self-proclaimed liberals have never included (their own) risk or the expansion of market rights, not to mention civil rights, in their agenda. Democracy itself, in Brazil, is an asset of the forces on the left of the political spectrum, as it has always been a demand and a banner of struggle for this political field.

It's time to wage a war of values, to build the symbols of a new agenda. We are heading into the seventh presidential election since redemocratization; it's impossible that we still don't know, along with the price of bread, the bus queue, the waiting time at the hospital, how to discuss the highest aspirations for the country. May Dilma's re-election signify a profound change of agenda, because we must indeed change cycles and regain the capacity to imagine, to make real, what until yesterday seemed impossible. Because, however much the mission of the opposition and its henchmen in the media is to make us believe more in our limitations than in our capabilities, in truth, today nothing is beyond our reach.

At this point, I believe, the President has already assessed the bad advice given to her by those who suggested the summary that, in the case of publicly licensed media outlets, the only acceptable control is "remote control"; therefore, it will be necessary to confront the debate we haven't had: media regulation is not censorship, but the pursuit of guaranteeing plurality by legally preventing the creation and maintenance of monopolies in this sector – as advanced democracies do. If the PT (Workers' Party) is afraid to address the relationship between a significant portion of the corporate press and opposition parties for fear of being attacked by outlets like Veja, Folha, Estadão, and Globo, it will continue to be attacked by these same outlets; if the PT is afraid to talk about regulating media for fear of being attacked by the press that opposes the democratization of communication in the country, it will continue to be attacked by them anyway.

Note that I haven't prioritized the war that the media is waging and will continue to wage to replace the PT with the PSDB in the country's central government; we've experienced it in every election we've faced, with only a slight shift in the media's stance during the 2002 election. The more faith there is in Brazil, the more reasons the population will have to vote for the PT; and the less toxic the poison cultivated in newsrooms serving the right-wing opposition will be.