Marina Silva's soft liberalism

Grumbling against "old politics" and signaling to the various sectors that clash with the institutional system, both on the right and the left, the PSB candidate is preparing a strategy for the soft restoration of neoliberal paradigms, in which she promises to maintain the social policies of the last twelve years.

His program rests on a magic quartet of profound changes: independence of the Central Bank, deregulation of bank credit, interruption or reform of the profit-sharing regime for pre-salt exploration, and realignment with the United States.

The election campaign is gradually revealing the meaning of these policies, although Marina and her allies prefer to prohibit debate, in a frantic effort to keep the dispute only in its symbolic field, between the new and the old, between the saint and the manager.

The programmatic core it offers the country, however, leaves no doubt as to its class character and its doctrinaire nature. It is the broadest platform for the empowerment of financial capital since the 90s, guaranteeing it an institutional supremacy unthinkable even for the PSDB (Brazilian Social Democracy Party).

The Central Bank, transformed into a legally independent stronghold, would function as an enclave within the State, controlling monetary and exchange rate policy, as well as supervising and regulating the entire financial system.

Banks would be progressively freed from allocating specific loans at lower interest rates, as is currently the case, for example, with housing policy. In practice, these special lines of credit would be operated only by public banks, reducing their margins and weakening them as competitors.

BNDES would lose financing capacity, opening the market for private banks to occupy that space, with the possibility of attracting new international institutions to this windfall of interest rates and profits.

The attraction of foreign capital would be strengthened by the liberalization of the production-sharing regime, with Petrobras losing its right as the mandatory operator of all fields and the end of the local content policy, as already announced by the general coordinator of Marina's campaign, Walter Feldmann.

International policy would also shift, moving towards the White House's sphere of gravity, to align the Brazilian economy with global capitalist centers, conceiving Brazilian development as necessarily dependent on the productive and financial chain of large corporations.

These themes are openly present in Marina's program. In the same way that the bourgeoisie sought in Fernando Henrique Cardoso, twenty years ago, the name that could rebuild its political hegemony, the maneuver now uses the former senator and former minister from the Workers' Party as an instrument, in the face of the decline of the PSDB (Brazilian Social Democracy Party).

Marina's discourse against the polarization between the PT and PSDB parties, her chants against "old politics," and her self-projection above class conflicts are part of a repertoire whose sole objective is to rejuvenate the worn-out ideals of neoliberalism and the social groups that defend them.