We share an unofficial translation of the Editorial of A Nova Democracia.

The boycott rates for the electoral farce, in its municipal section, reaffirm the already historic increase and mark, at the same time, a deepening. The abstention rate in this first round is the highest since 2000 (a part from, of course, the 2020 election, which took place in the middle of the pandemic), reaching 21.68%. This means 33.8 million Brazilian men and women who, having registered and being regularized within the electoral court, decided to abstain. This, however, is not even close to the real approximate number, as invalid votes, blank votes and those, such as youth aged 16 to 18 who are not obliged to vote and people who had their vote canceled so many times, are not being counted, fouls that did not even regularize their title, a phenomenon that, in Brazil, is relatively widespread. The number of people of voting age, but who are irregular, is uncertain: in 2017, the number published was 1.9 million, but only in 2018, the Superior Electoral Court announced that 6 million voters had their registration canceled; this year, 2024, the court reported that, in the state of Bahia alone, more than 1.6 million titles were canceled. The high rates in municipal elections, when they are traditionally lower (due to the personal control of oligarchies, rural or urban, armed, over voters), also draw attention.

The deepening of the boycott is an expression of the crisis of the old bourgeois democracy: as we have said, the masses, in their spontaneous process in which a sprout of proletarian consciousness germinates and which has been driven by the revolutionary intervention of the conscious proletarian element, have already concluded, in general terms, that suffrage and universal representation, above classes, are deceptions; that the institutions are partial and that elections cannot transform anything in favor of the popular masses; nor do they believe that they owe “democratic” institutions any esteem, since they themselves, the masses, only receive contempt, indifference, permanent oppression and repression from “authorities” every time they mobilize for their rights.

This phenomenon, although it seems to result purely and exclusively from the spontaneous, “natural” degradation of the political system, the demoralization and discredit of its institutions, by its practices of abuse of power and injustices against the people, is unthinkable without the intervention of the revolutionary element, of the revolutionary movement within the situation of a general counter-revolutionary offensive throughout the world and, particularly, in the country, which, through the demands of the masses and radicalized actions, calls for a boycott of this electoral farce. The current cycle of crisis and exhaustion of bourgeois democracy in Brazil is the failure of the 1988 constituent, propagated by opportunists and revisionists, since those times, as the one that would fully guarantee social rights; popular illusions with the constituent were shattered when, throughout the PT governments (2003-2014), the babbled government program of “popular developmentalism” revealed itself to be mere populist rhetoric. There, the “citizen constitution” unmasks itself along with the electoral and opportunist “popular front government”, to the extent that it is unmasked: it is no coincidence that the year 2004, the beginning of the opportunist PT heyday, records the lowest rate of abstentions of the century: 14.2%, greatly recovering the 2000 index. Therefore, the 14-year period of management of the old State by opportunism represents this cycle of bourgeois democracy in pure bankruptcy (1988), and agonizing, struck to death by the defeat strategic-programmatic of developmental reformism and whose frustration and disillusionment with it, by broad sectors of the population, is the basis on which the political rise of the extreme right and fascism took place. But this electoral opportunism of this bourgeois left elevated to government is defeated by the calloused hands of the poor peasants, who throughout these years led numerous battles to conquer land, which came to unmask it, and penetrated the bases of the co-opted popular movements, disintegrating them and, finally, preventing the government from ignoring and burying the agrarian-peasant issue from the national political agenda, unharmed. It was defeated at the hands of the workers in the revolts at the PAC works, in the large constructions of hydroelectric plants in the North and Northeast and port infrastructures, true proletarian uprisings that are at the basis of the demoralization of the opportunist government in its “popular base” and animation of the union movement workers and forces that were previously satellites of the PT, without the 2013-14 uprisings would not have existed as such. It was defeated by student’s resistance that unmasked the PT government’s privatist and corporatist programs, making an entire generation of activists aware of the betrayal of social democracy. In short, all struggles of the revolutionary movement united with the popular masses, without which we would not be, today, talking about the agony of this putrefied cycle of the old democracy, whose high rates of boycott are an expression and sign. Of course, in the impossibility of revolutionary forces to embrace and give not only general political direction, but organic and concrete direction to these masses, part of them allows themselves to be dragged by the antagonist to bourgeois democracy supported by sectors of the dominant classes, the extreme right and fascism. But, that is history, and every true revolution, when acting, disorganizes the scenario and often also generates a powerful counter-revolution, which must be defeated by persisting, and not prevented by renouncing the fight itself.

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It is not enough to simply denounce the crisis of the old democracy, its crisis and its theoretical limitations; it is necessary to contrast it with the revolutionary struggle, not the abstract one about which many “little stars” from various opportunist political currents speak eloquently, but with the real struggle that, today, lives as a sprout of hope for the New Brazil: the revolutionary peasant struggle, mainly. The example of the peasant resistance struggle, such as the Battle of the Barro Branco squatters, in Jaqueira (PE), should be a beacon for democrats and revolutionaries: the two Bolsonarist paramilitaries shot in the midst of the confrontation are an expression of the war for possession of the land. The secular peasant war, historically very underestimated by the Brazilian revolutionary movement, and which was demanded and carried out by some generations of brave communists, who did not bargain for sacrifices to pave the way for the revolution, never ceased, but after very harsh defeats it always resumed, got up. This has been the highest stage of the peasant struggle in recent decades, preparing a great leap forward. This is the reality in rural areas of the country: poor peasants, indigenous people and Quilombolas are struggling there, on the one hand, and the historically large estates, today defended by Bolsonarist paramilitary hordes supported by contingents of the police forces of the old State, on the other.

This armed conflagration, even prior to Marxism, can be seen to be only today inseparably and completely linked to the proletarian revolutionary movement, as it had never been before in the history of the country. Therefore, at this historical moment, like at no other, the democratic revolution and the peasant revolutionary struggle can triumph, as one. No matter how much the opportunists may twist words to omit their historic defeat, the facts are stubborn. It is here where Popular Power, New Democracy, can be born, and where it will be born, which today, more than ever, emanates from the armed peasant masses who educate themselves in truly revolutionary battles, against the Bolsonarist hordes, under the direction of the proletariat. Therefore, it is urgent to cry out: War on the Bolsonarist paramilitary hordes and their supporters in fact and in words! Death to the latifundium! Long live the Agrarian Revolution!

In,