Marina in the PSB and the urgency of political reform.

And Marina Silva chose to join the PSB, a party, according to her, that is traditional and no different from the PT or the PSDB. She decided to play the game by the rules. In itself, there is nothing to condemn.

The problem is our political and electoral legislation. All parties, to a greater or lesser degree, have carried out similar moves to secure affiliations for potential candidates next year.

While it's impossible to condemn the act of joining the PSB itself, it's certainly possible to criticize Marina's stance during her attempt to create her Sustainability Network, which she attributed to the lack of spaces where politics was treated with seriousness, ethics, commitment, and many other things she used to try and justify its creation. All very vague, it must be said.

Real life

By joining the PSB, Marina accepted the political game she claimed to reject. She entered a political party that opted for a pragmatism worse than that of the PT. Worse because the PT at least has the excuse (and it's not just any excuse) of being the main party in the federal government and, with the current institutional logic, coalitions are more than necessary.

The PSB doesn't live in that reality; it could be more programmatic than pragmatic. Or perhaps the ideas developed by Miguel Arraes were thrown in the trash by his grandson, Eduardo Campos, the party's national president?

Marina is now in the same party as the Bornhausens. Jorge's son, Paulo, a loyal member of the 1964 civil-military dictatorship, will be a candidate in Santa Catarina for the PSB. Heráclito Fortes, formerly of the DEM in Piauí, has also become a socialist in Campos and is now his running mate. Ronaldo Caiado, leader of the DEM in the Chamber of Deputies and of the rural caucus, argues that his party should support the PSB in 2014. How cruel real life is.

Since leaving the PT (Workers' Party), Marina has advocated for a new way of doing politics, but she has given up on joining those who want a reform that strengthens programmatic debate. She was defeated by pragmatism.

His alliance with Eduardo Campos in the PSB party, in itself, doesn't mean anything in terms of votes in the next elections. It only means that, in the case of a "purebred" PSB ticket, we could have a slightly stronger candidacy that could wrest the center of the opposition in Brazil from Aécio (or Serra). We'll have to wait and see about that for now.

Political reform

Unfortunately, instead of all this movement by the parties to accommodate personalities in their ranks with a view to the 2014 elections further fueling the debate on political reform, it only feeds the betting pool on how many votes each name will get at the end of the day on October 5th of next year.

The contradictions exposed in the last month only reinforce the need to change the way politics is done in Brazil, the relationship between institutions, parties, financial capital in politics, the media—in short, a series of things that directly affect our democracy. But it seems that this will have to wait. Again.