ISL zoom meeting 5pm Sunday, 27 November with Vera Lúcia from Brazil. Vera stood for the PSTU and Socialist and Revolutionary Pole in these and other presidential elections. The PSTU campaigned for a critical vote for Lula in this 2nd round.
We invite you to listen to and discuss with Vera who will be speaking about Brazil today. Vera was born into a poor Afro-Brazilian family in the state of Pernambuco. She started work in a shoe factory, and became a trade unionist to fight the conditions and low wages employers imposed. Today she is a Brazilian Trotskyist and a revolutionary affiliated with the Unified Workers’ Socialist Party and the International Workers League-Fourth International. She has contested presidential elections many times.
The international world of workers, oppressed people and activists received the news of Bolsonaro’s defeat and the failure of the mobilisation of his supporters and police during and after the elections with celebration and relief.
The new government has not yet taken over, however, the first steps of the transition between the Bolsonaro and Lula governments already confirms the maintenance of the current economic policy is continuing a government with and for billionaires. The Lula-Alckmin government does not represent a real alternative to Bolsonaro from the point of view of economic policy, or workers’ rights nor will it be able to definitively defeat the ultra-right.
The extreme right is here to stay unless it is truly defeated with the independent organization and mobilization of the working class. They have to be defeated in the streets and conditions changed that made its emergence and rise possible: hunger, unemployment, precariousness and the process of degradation and retrogression of the country.
