BH threatens Kassab's fledgling PSD party. Kassab's?

Minas 247 – After securing two major victories and celebrating the right to airtime for political advertising and a larger share of the Party Fund, the PSD, created by São Paulo mayor Gilberto Kassab last year, has encountered its first crisis. Kassab's intervention to get the PSD to support the PT in Belo Horizonte displeased the party's vice-president, Senator Katia Abreu, who even stated in an interview published this Monday that the São Paulo mayor leads the party based on "centralism and authoritarianism." The tone of the criticism has escalated, and it's time to put out the fire, Kassab realized.

"It's a large party, which has disagreements, but they will be resolved through dialogue," downplayed the mayor of São Paulo. "Senator Katia Abreu is well-intentioned, she acts thinking about what's best for the PSD, but from the beginning it was known that she wouldn't agree with the intervention in Minas," added the president of the PSD, who is counting on the words of his leader in the Chamber to try to calm the senator. "Discussions like this (between Kassab and Katia Abreu) ​​are part of party democracy. There is no crisis in the PSD," assured Congressman Guilherme Campos in an interview with Terra Magazine.

Campos also lamented, however, the "necessity" of an intervention in Belo Horizonte. "Nobody likes to do what was done, but it was a necessity, a party position of the majority of the caucus. What we have to do now is ensure that events like this don't happen again," he said. But, despite Kassab and Campos' attempts to present the party as democratic, the facts speak for themselves. "We only had one Executive meeting and never again. That was more than a year ago," laments Katia Abreu.

From then on, the senator recalls, "we had several opportunities for debates in which we could contribute to the country and we were absent. We are in the midst of a serious economic crisis and what does the PSD think?", continues the vice-president of the party, who, in the interview with Folha de S.Paulo this Monday, comments that last Wednesday the 11th the PSD held a get-together to which less than 15 of the approximately 50 party members attended – she and Kassab were among those absent.

Besides the senator from Tocantins, many people in the PSD are dissatisfied with the national executive's position. Especially those from Minas Gerais. The executive secretary of the party in Minas Gerais, Alexandre Silveira, filed a request to challenge the coalition with the PT. Silveira, closely linked to the PSDB, is the secretary of Governor Antônio Anastasia (PSDB). The leader of the PSD in Minas Gerais did not hold back in his criticism of Kassab. For him, the measure taken by the mayor of São Paulo was "illegitimate," "immoral," "degrading," and "truculent."

The PSD is new, but it does politics the same way as its older siblings. The longer-established parties have learned over time, however, that it's necessary to at least feign a democratic internal structure. Either the PSD gets its act together or it risks contesting, this year, the only election in its brief history.