The Workers’ Party is moribund. It breathes, and barely so, through two life-support machines — Lula himself, intubated in the ICU, battling for his own survival, and the STF (Supreme Federal Court), which now provides all the air they breathe. It no longer commands votes, which in politics means it lacks independent life. It has no leadership. It has no accomplishments whatsoever to present to the public, for it has no projects, and it has no projects because it has no ideas. Long ago it ceased to be the party of workers, morphing instead into the party of unionists — who have nothing to do with the world of labor. Its causes, today, are the unyielding defense of the planet’s most abject dictatorships, mass corruption, and criminals in general.
The PT, of course, is entrenched in government, in Correios (state-owned postal service company) and INSS (National Social Security Institute), within the state apparatus and the lunch boxes, in the public coffers, and possesses a handsome R$500 million in “Electoral Fund” money. It has access, and here we’re talking billions, to funds from the Rouanet Law. It enjoys the devout support of the banking elite, billionaires with pending cases before the STF, and the “national champions” clinging to the nation’s Treasury — not to mention every thief of the public purse running loose. It maintains the best relations and partnerships with organized crime. It serves and is served by those who most exploit political backwardness in the North-Northeast regions. It has become addicted to its own vices.
What does any of this have to do with the Brazilian people? Nothing at all. In fact, the PT is amid a contentious divorce from Brazil’s citizens. There isn’t a single objective interest of the flesh-and-blood populace, from protection against crime to tax reduction, championed by the PT and the Left nowadays. No magnate, not even the sub-magnate, the sub-sub-magnate, or the sub-sub-sub-magnate, rides a bus, gets treated by the SUS (Unified Health System), or stands in any line. There isn’t a single fat cat among them who has to earn a living through their own labor. Instead of relying on the actual working class, they rely on Alexandre de Moraes.
The latest measurement of the PT’s vital signs would terrify a Cuban doctor — one of those bought by Lula to work under slave-like conditions for the Cuban government. At a time when the populace is enraged by grocery prices, the lack of coherent prospects for income increase, and the abysmal quality of services provided by the State, the party’s priorities are to block Jair Bolsonaro’s bank accounts, or to arrest his son Eduardo, currently in the United States. They talk about Palestine, defend unions and NGOs that stole R$6 billion from retirees. They demand quotas for transgenders, punishments for agribusinesses, and the consumption of organic food — plus the “fight” against “climate” change. This is not what the people want to hear.
How could it be otherwise? A party that reduces itself to having the current PT caucus leader as its general captain in the Chamber of Deputies has truly opted for suicide in terms of popular representation. Firstly, he is a two-time convicted felon by the Criminal Justice system and is only free because the court’s decision was blocked by a duty judge in Rio de Janeiro. (This is yet another of the vices described above; when the Left needs something from the judiciary, they simply have the ruling delivered to the judge’s home.) Was there truly no one better, no matter who, to be the PT’s leader in the Chamber?
But worse than this is what he actually does. His current priority is the sordid trafficking of judicial decisions to block Bolsonaro’s bank accounts — he doesn’t want Bolsonaro’s son to receive remittances from his father in the United States. As a mark of personal character, it’s a calamity: he turns against his own colleague in the Chamber. It’s also an aberration. The remittances, whether or not sent, are legal; financial authorities and the STF, for that matter, know everything about the former president’s finances. What the PT’s leader desires is bad faith, demagoguery, and ignorance all at once. Even worse than all this, and an obvious symptom of the Left’s political coma, is the clear sign that the PT, today, is light-years away from any proposal that resonates with the agenda of the common citizen.
This is what’s left of the PT and its partners ‘s program — a petty heap of denials and prayers for police repression. “No to amnesty,” they repeat, like Muslims on their knees praying toward Mecca. “No” to freedom of expression on social media and “yes” to censorship. Revocation of mandates, opening of criminal inquiries, punishments for those suspected of “homophobia,” “racism,” and “machismo.” “No” to the teaching of correct Portuguese, mathematics, and exact sciences. Blind support for a president who denies fundamental values of Brazilian society — family, religion, common morality, homeland, aversion to crime. Lula says all this is a “backwards political agenda.” The Left applauds.
Even worse than their negativist agenda is their supposed ‘propositive’ agenda. The PT, like the rest of the global Left, has become a megaphone repeating the sole idea of current “progressivism”: a society that is just the State, without the citizens. This doctrine reserves for human beings the exclusive function of paying taxes to sustain bureaucratic castes who appoint themselves to rule all, because they consider themselves the only ones qualified to define common good and evil. The PT dreams of being a China — the ideal combination of savage private property and police dictatorship. It rambles on about an imaginary, globalized country, like the “Federal Europe” of the Macrons and Merkels, governed by an elite of bureaucrats and billionaires with a “social footprint,” a net importer of misery to do the heavy lifting, and a stage for charlatans like Marina Silva.
The PT’ Brazil is a country where those unelected, at all levels, increasingly make decisions that affect the common interest and the daily lives of tax-paying citizens. It is a Brazil where the Attorney General, without anyone’s oversight, decides that the State of Roraima cannot utilize electricity generated on Brazilian territory because they don’t want transmission lines crossing “indigenous areas.” It’s also a Brazil that prohibits the construction of a railway essential for the national economy in Mato Grosso. It is a Brazil where the STF does not allow the teaching of grammar in municipal public schools, and where appointed officials from the Ministry of Education choose what your child must learn in school. It is the Brazil of the white dictatorship of the lbama inspector, the Incra inspector, the tax inspector, the inspector of this and that, who authorizes, prohibits, and commands. It is the Brazil where “Electoral Justice” is worth more than the vote. The voter elects; the TSE (Superior Electoral Court) revokes.
On top of all this, the Brazilian Left, especially during these last two and a half years of the Lula administration, has abandoned any pretense of having an economic policy for the country. It has one idea, and only one, when it comes to the economy: increasing taxes. There is no second idea, no alternative: it’s either more taxes, or more taxes. The general principle is that citizens are obligatorily forced to adapt their pockets to the State’s expenses: if it’s agreed you pay 100 reais in taxes, but the government spent 150, it is you who must always cover the extra 50, since all the money in circulation belongs to people, not some supernatural entity.
In such cases, couldn’t one consider reducing expenses? No, under no circumstances. Rule number 1 of our economic policy — and there is no Rule number 2 — is that anything goes, except for one thing: cutting government spending. It absolutely does not matter to the PT whether, in a budget of R$5.5 trillion like the current one, there is any unnecessary expenditure. It’s a matter of principle. “A court decision is not debated, it is obeyed,” right? Therefore: State expenses are not debated, they are paid. Not even the R$63 million Janja alone has already spent on international trips? Not even the vintage wines of the Supreme Court? Not even the new armored SUVs for the directors of now bankrupt Correios? No, not even that.
There is nothing more instructive for understanding the PT’s economic policy than the latest decisions made in Brasília concerning your money. Not only do you have to pay for everything the government spends, whatever it is, but you must also pay for what they steal. In the theft from INSS retirees, for example, the government promises to replace the money stolen from the elderly — but with the tax you pay every time you fill up your gas tank or turn on your house lights. Couldn’t one ask Lula’s brother, perhaps, to be kind enough to return the share that went to his union? Not a chance. They steal. You pay.
And what about this sinister increase in the IOF (Tax on Financial Operations)? The government, without paying any attention to what it was doing, saw fit to increase the IOF — by up to tenfold in some cases. It suddenly got scared by its expenditure and, once again, went to extort money from the people; once again, it didn’t even entertain the idea of cutting expenses. All right. It’s known that the Left, philosophically, is against citizens keeping the money they themselves earned, and on which they’ve already paid taxes; it also wants to confiscate what they’ve saved, hence its relentless persecution of “financial gains.” But then they were ashamed of stealing and not being able to carry it all away. There was an uproar, as expected. Lula backpedaled; he always backpedals, just like he did in the case of the attempted Pix coup. (In Alexandre de Moraes’s mind, an attempted coup is the same as a coup crime — not for everyone, of course.) But he tumbled down and is currently trying to fix the problem with a cure that’s worse than the disease.
The government’s initial reaction, through the non-economist Fernando Haddad, was to resort to blackmail: either the IOF increases, or public services collapse, there’s a shutdown, nobody receives another penny from the public purse. But who spent all the money that had already been paid in taxes, and ended up with nothing — them or you? Such an undemocratic question. The truth is, the jig is up, and now they’ve teamed up with the Mottas and Alcolumbres to attempt another kludge. According to Lula, there was no government error. There never is. What happened is that Minister Haddad, poor fellow, in “his eagerness to provide a quick response to society,” acted much too well, and now “we’re going to talk” to “settle our fiscal accounts.”
But “society” wasn’t asking for “any response”; it just doesn’t want to be robbed again and only asks the government to leave people alone. Furthermore, who messed up the accounts? As always, not a word, not even a lie, about spending cuts; it seems they’re not even bothering to lie anymore. Ultimately, the people will pay, through some trick they make up, with the excuse that the money will come “from companies,” or “from the rich” — as if that has ever happened in the history of humanity. It’s another classic case of “when push comes to shove” — nd “shove” always lands on the taxpayer.
Were Brazil a democracy, the solution would be less than a year and a half away — in the 2026 general elections, this government would be swept from the face of the Earth. But the Brazil run by the STF-Lula consortium is not a democracy; it is a rigged game where elections are decided not by the majority of the electorate, but by a TSE that, with each election, asserts absolute authority without genuine mandate. Public scrutiny does not exist, because there is no public vote count, and anyone who requests any form of verification is punished with a R$22 million fine, without due process, without the right to lawyers, and without the possibility of appeal. The campaign is not free: it is forbidden to say that Lula is a thief, even though Brazilian Justice has stated he is passively corrupt and a money launderer, through sentences delivered by nine different judges across three successive instances.
Now, with 2026 in mind, they are already stirring again. The Supreme Court has already condemned Bolsonaro for “coup”; it hasn’t yet delivered the sentence, but it has already condemned him before trial, practically in broad daylight. A PT magnate has already proposed a rule change for Senate elections, bringing back the figure of the “bionic senator” from the military dictatorship. Lula himself, finally, has discovered that it’s time to disrupt the Senate election — which in 2026 will replace two-thirds of its members. He is already saying that the opposition cannot win, because if they win, they will create “chaos” for the country, and he will not allow that. They won’t create any “chaos”; but they might, perhaps, exercise their constitutional duty to oversee and set limits on the STF. This is what Oeste has been saying for over two years — not because there’s any political scientist here, but because the law states that a majority of senators can impeach a Supreme Court justice, or as many as they deem necessary. A government in ruins like that of Lula-Janja-PT-STF-etc. has everything to collapse in a Senate elected in a free and decent ballot.
The only path increasingly open to such consortium seems to be dictatorship — a judicial dictatorship in the guise of a “re-civilized” civilian, but a dictatorship, nonetheless. The furious zeal to censor social media and revoke the speech of millions of Brazilians, as well as their right to be freely informed wherever and however they choose, is clear proof that they do not want clean elections next year. Their model and roadmap are well-known. If there’s dictatorship in Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, and if the CEEs, UNs, woke multinationals, and other “civilizing entities” find it beautiful, why not do the same thing here? The OAB (Brazilian Bar Association), the Armed Forces, the bishops, those who sign letters to “Brazilians,” and the cultural classes will give the consortium a standing ovation. For now, at least, they have been applauding.
The problem with achieving their ends, as always, lies in the means. ” The best laid plans, of mice and men, often go awry” teaches Robert Burns’ poem, and indeed they do. Hitler, in his final hour, had been moving non-existent troops and issuing orders that could not be carried out. It’s similar to Lula and his ministers, hunched over, looking foolish, at the PT-aligned new world map designed by IBGE (Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics), where Brazil appears at the center of the known world. They might be forgetting another Brazil — a country much larger than the ambitions of a president and a party that stand naked.
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