Lula’s economic commandments became negative, a little elusive. As the campaign progresses, the PT presidential candidate enumerates, drop by drop, the precepts with which he hopes to mobilize the devotees who carry his candidacy on the litter. They all start with “no”.
Elected, Lula will not admit the spending cap. He will not preserve labor reform. Nor will it accept changes made to the union funding model. It will not tolerate privatizations such as Eletrobras. It will not swallow Petrobras’ pricing policy.
At an event organized by Força Sindical on Thursday, Lula declared that “the mentality of those who carried out the labor reform, the union reform, is the slave mentality, of those who think that unions do not have to be strong, they do not have representation.”
Michel Temer put on his hat: “The only intention of ex-president Lula, surely and surely, is to reestablish the union tax”, he told Estadão. “Therefore, let him expressly say so and not make accusations against those who have not taken away any rights from workers. Our labor reform added rights to Brazilian workers.” he quoted the possibility of splitting vacations, the formal registration of intermittent work, the bank of hours and the home office.
The day before, at a meeting with university presidents held in Juiz de Fora, Lula had reiterated his dislike of the spending ceiling, another innovation introduced in the Constitution under Michel Temer.
In a campaign marked by the starvation of ideas, people are waiting with some agony for the moment when the first place in all presidential polls will begin to say what they want to put in place of the labor reform and the spending ceiling, already unveiled by Bolsonaro.
We are waiting for the moment when Lula will inform how he plans to contain fuel readjustments without resorting to the freeze adopted under Dilma, who opened a hole in Petrobras’ cash.
There is a lot of anxiety to know what precautions Lula plans to adopt to prevent the state-owned companies that he will not privatize if he returns to the Planalto from descending to the low political level again.
Lula takes seriously a reasoning that he exposed in the interview published a few days ago by the American magazine Time: “We don’t discuss economic policy before winning the elections,” he said.
Behind this statement hides the fear of being dragged into a debate about the damage done to the economy during Dilma Rousseff’s administration. It was Madame’s downfall that, under Temer’s administration, boosted labor reform and the spending cap.
Lula’s desire to receive a blank check from the electorate does not create a scenario in which high prices, unemployment and hopelessness are mixed. At the Força Sindical event, Lula made a concession to the obvious by saying the following:
“We need to gain credibility, so that people believe what we say. We need to be predictable.” Bingo!
The first step towards providing predictability to an eventual third term would be Lula to stop behaving like a customer who enters the restaurant, sits at the table, reads the menu and tells the waiter what he does not want to eat. Lula needs to start saying what she wants.
