The pre-salt reserves and the intrigues

The government bloc achieved an overwhelming victory tonight, with a score of 217 to 57, approving bill 8939/17, by José Carlos Aleluia (DEM), which will allow Petrobras to sell 70% of what it owns in the onerous transfer area to third parties.

The opposition remained united against the bill. PT, PCdoB, PSOL, PDT, PSB, and even Rede, tried in every way to impose obstructions, cancellation requests, and finally, palliative amendments, but lost all the votes.

The obstruction remains, so there is still no definitive solution to the impasse.

I wanted to take this opportunity to try to put an end to a new partisan intrigue, a result of electoral tensions, according to which part of the PDT party allegedly sided with the government (or with the "coup"), with 11 deputies from the party voting in favor of the urgency request for the project in question.

In fact, inexplicably, the PDT voted "yes" on the urgency request, and some deputies, a total of 11 according to the news sites, voted in favor. I also still don't understand why the Minority leadership, exercised by the PT, released the directive to the benches of allied parties.

The "yes" vote for urgency received 281 votes (24 more than necessary), so the supposed votes of the PDT in favor made no difference in the final result. This does not excuse them, of course, but it also does not authorize us to attribute to them a blame that is not theirs, since the PDT, in the vote on the Project, positioned itself against it.

The leader of the PDT in the Chamber of Deputies, Congressman André Figueiredo (CE), made strong speeches against the bill. Manuel Dias, former Minister of Labor in the Dilma government and one of the most important figures in the PDT, also publicly opposed the bill.

The progressive camp needs to be very careful. The Temer government is apparently taking advantage of the cooling of the political climate, caused by the World Cup, and the progressive shift in attention from parties, the press, and society to the electoral process, to rebuild its majority in Congress, including at the cost of clever moves to divide, deceive, and confuse the opposition.

In this context, petty electoral intrigues will not help the left to form a cohesive bloc against the government. I did a survey of the PDT's history since the coup. The party voted 100% against the bill that exempted multinational oil companies from taxes (the so-called Trillion Dollar Provisional Measure), and has positioned itself similarly in all votes dealing with the pre-salt oil reserves and/or other important projects.

With a few exceptions, unfortunately.

The PDT has its contradictions. Mario Heringer, president of the PDT in Minas Gerais, for example, holds more conservative positions than the rest of the party. He was one of the deputies who voted in favor of impeachment.

These contradictions within progressive groups need to be addressed intelligently, not with electoral sectarianism, as we have seen the PCO do in its new role as "PT advisor." The PCO, in its obsession with keeping the PT isolated from other political forces, or out of some inconsequential spite, has adopted a stance of very strong animosity towards the PDT and Ciro Gomes. Some progressive websites and sectors of the PT's militant base have followed the same path. Any newspaper headline, any supposed "information" hastily gathered that can be used to generate a "narrative" attacking Ciro Gomes, is hastily converted into sensationalist headlines and poisoned texts.

The PSB voted overwhelmingly in favor of impeachment, and yet it is considered a strategic party by all left-wing parties, including the PT. And rightly so, because PSB parliamentarians have recently voted in a way that aligns with popular and national interests. The advance of the class struggle is causing the PSB to migrate back to its original ideological roots.

PDT and PSB must be treated as friends and politically drawn into the core of the center-left, which needs to grow and win back sectors of the center, and even the center-right, provided that this, naturally, means moving society forward in the right direction. This requires a constant effort to neutralize intrigues.

Political parties are not static institutions. Their parliamentarians, members, and activists are political animals who can go one way or another, depending on how social struggles develop.

Recently, for example, there were two regrettable cases of partisan intrigue. The first stemmed from an interview given by Nelson Marconi, coordinator of Ciro Gomes's government program, to the BBC. A segment of the interview, transcribed somewhat ambiguously by the agency, was treated with hostile sensationalism by several websites. The headlines claimed that "Ciro defends the privatization of refineries." This was not true. Fortunately, social media quickly dismantled this intrigue.

Then another case of intrigue occurred: Globo published an article stating, in the title, that "Ciro denies pardon to Lula". Some websites or activists reproduced the headline of the report without any concern that they were, in a sense, spreading "fake news", since the meaning they gave to the content was exactly the opposite of reality.

Anyone who bothered to log into Globo's website and read the article would see that Ciro's full statement said he refused to promise a pardon to the former president because he considered his sentence "unjust." Lula himself, through messages sent via Gleise and Paulo Okamoto, has already made it clear that he doesn't want any candidate advocating for a pardon for him, because pardons are for the guilty, and he defends his innocence. And if a candidate really intends to pardon Lula, it's better that they say nothing, because such a promise would only create electoral, political, and perhaps even legal embarrassments for themselves and for the former president. If someone is going to pardon Lula, let them do it without warning beforehand.

Furthermore, we cannot forget that the Supreme Federal Court (STF) canceled the pardons sanctioned by President Michel Temer, which had been sent to him by a Council established precisely for that purpose. In other words, it is pointless today to even have the prerogative to pardon. Like everything else in the country, it is first necessary to build a majority in public opinion, with enough strength to exert pressure on the judiciary. Or rather, with enough strength to neutralize the pressure coming from the media.

The left has no right to make a delusional interpretation of reality. Today's vote in the Chamber demonstrated that it is in a clear minority in Congress, and nothing indicates that its situation is much better in society.

For this year, winning the elections is not enough. The progressive camp must go beyond victory at the polls. It also needs a great political and moral victory. And this can only happen if we build a majority in the middle class, among students, among intellectuals, increasingly winning over broad and diverse sectors of society through convincing arguments. To achieve this, we must not follow the advice of sectarians, nor spend all our time on the lookout to catch errors, contradictions, or even slips by our allies. Criticism is valid and necessary. But trickery, dirty tricks, and narrative traps will only lead us further astray.