In “Why is the left dead?” », recently published by Editora Civilização Brasileira, the sociologist Jesse Souza, professor at the ABC Federal University and author of “The poor right” and “The elite of delay”, makes an autopsy of the progressive field in Brazil.
In the work’s subtitle — “what we must do to resurrect it” — he offers suggestions for the reinvention of the left, thinking both about the 2026 elections and the near future, when President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT) will be absent from the polls. In an interview with GLOBO, he believes that a discourse focused on tax justice and national sovereignty is a possible formula for reinventing this area.
Read the interview below:
You say you wrote the book “desperate.” For what?
I wrote in total despair, seeing the humiliated majority of the population continuing to adhere to the far-right discourse. And on the left, there is not even an attempt to construct an alternative social imaginary. The scenario that will follow President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT) is that of scorched earth. The left will only be strong if it develops a discourse that gives priority to the exploited. If you have the ambition to think of a country composed of citizens, and not of post-slaves, commanded by the project of the São Paulo elite, which faces the reality of universal suffrage. Alone, this elite does not even elect a senator. He successfully applied strategies to manipulate the desires of the poor, which I detailed in “The Poor on the Right.” Now I’m trying to understand why the left stopped competing for this layer, what their stupidity was.
The PT has resigned itself to being Plan B for the São Paulo elite, a treat offered to the poor to guarantee a minimum of social order. The São Paulo elite, the ones that really count, have a project of Americanized power, with the defense of entrepreneurship. On condition of having subsidies and public benefits, because it considers the State as a business. Symbolic holder of power, she controls the diffusion of ideas and frequents occasional interests, from Bolsonaro to Pablo Marçal via Governor Tarcísio de Freitas (Republicans). She presents herself as the most willing to vote. It is up to the “ignorant” majority to follow the order, a belief repeated from top to bottom down to the social level. And the cream of the intellectual elite drank the poison by defining the PT as an acronym for the defense of ethics in politics. He did what he did.
The São Paulo elite presents corruption, always that of others, and not slavery, as the original evil of the country. After consecutive years of PT governments, defending morality for others has become the basis for convincing the poor to the right. And the PT fell into the trap. It won’t be with funny memes that the desperate situation will be reversed.
Research points to President Lula (PT) in 2026. Isn’t it premature to do an autopsy on the left?
Lula’s luminosity, demonstrated once again in the reaction to the customs tariff, masks the precariousness of the left. By highlighting the far from dusty reality of imperialism, with rare earths and big tech interests, Donald Trump offered an opportunity for the Brazilian left to resuscitate. Lula collaborates in the field of symbolic belonging, he is the poor one in Power. But all this, paradoxically, obscures the left’s fragility, as barroom chatter and 2022 congressional and state government poll results show. The left heads into 2026 without direction. Apart from Lula, he doesn’t know who he is. Don’t challenge ideas.
The appointment of the deputy Guilherme Boulos (PSOL-SP) for the ministry brought the government into the streets, as Lula said?
Yes, but it did not resolve the void in the conflict over visions of national identity. The government approaches 2026 attentive to daily life and its pressing issues – public security, revenue programs, taxes – but empty of ideas, dominated by the other flank. The left must tell people, as the right has done, the history of a country.
In this sense, can tax justice be an important weapon for the left?
Yes, provided that the story is not economistic, as in the macroeconomic figures of the Minister of Finance, Fernando Haddad (PT), and on the reindustrialization of Vice-President Geraldo Alckmin (PSB). Low-income voters want, as in the debate on working hours, to feel like protagonists, which must also be taken into account when it comes to national sovereignty.
Will the discourse on national sovereignty remain important in 2026?
Yes. And this can and must be used by the left to return to life. Tax justice and national sovereignty offer the opportunity to revive ideas poorly understood by those who, in both cases, have a knife and cheese in their hands. One of them is slavery, persisting in underemployment, mainly black, in exploitation and humiliation of labor, which must be addressed in the conflict.
Research shows that public safety is the right’s trump card for 2026. Can the left reverse this trend?
This is the thorniest question for the resurrection of the left. The challenge is to reconcile the defense of the individual with the denunciation of racism and social inequalities as the central origins of crime. And, at the same time, oppose generic punitivism, such as the reaction to the Complexo da Penha operation in Rio, while being attentive to voters’ feelings of insecurity. There is a need to advocate for tougher penalties for specific crimes, including rape and femicide, while working to increase public trust in the police and justice system. There is no other way to the left than to walk on the edge of this knife.
How could the left increase its votes in 2026?
If you expose and name the real enemy that leaves voters poorer, whoever is exploiting them. Or he will resign himself to the partisan representation of increasingly specific groups, such as identitarians. We must associate the legacy of slavery with the imperialist game, use intelligently the gift of Trump, who offered the password for the resurrection of the left. But the risk of missing an opportunity is great.
The government is now determined to speak to the people, but with what speech? It is important to strengthen social movements, but it is also necessary to speak directly to voters. One temptation is to celebrate being oppressed. The right got around this trap by arguing that the poor are free to change their condition on their own. The left must find its own narrative to win in 2026, including with the poor right winger and not in spite of him. To do this, you must make them aware of the real reasons for their disadvantaged situation.
The weakening of Bolsonarism, with the former president Jair Bolsonaro (PL) arrested, does this not leave the vote of the poor on the right even more at stake?
Lula is today in the lead in the race for 2026, but he does not win with the vote of the poor right but in spite of them, who will continue Bolsonarism, even if it is weakened. The betrayal of the country, with the customs tariffs, really hit (deputy) Eduardo Bolsonaro (PL-SP). But the far right remains led by the former president’s family. The Bolsonaros remain the most easily identifiable by this voter in terms of conservative morals, with their misogyny and their opposition to quotas and LGBTQUIA+ rights. The poor man on the right continues to believe that being heterosexual puts him in a superior position to women, gays, and those who are darker than he is. This is your breath of superiority. The vote of the poor on the right will continue in 2026 and is also, I insist, a reflection of the lack of development on the country. The left can and must compete for this vote, but to do so it must dedicate itself to enlightening these voters, investing in transforming them through ideas, something it was unable to do when it came to power in 2002, even with record popular approval and a more supportive and obedient Congress at the time.
Does the reinvention of the left involve the Amazon and the country’s leading environmental role?
Grapes. Including the appreciation of Amazonians as agents of awareness of the global emergency of the region, of the forest. They are especially affected, in fact, by the logic of social humiliation, felt from above, much more important than the left seems to realize. There is no point in sitting back and criticizing the agents of destruction down below. What they can’t do is simply receive the narrative from the right, from agriculture, that they will be the next soy kings. You have to go there, be there, and that takes time, work, strategy and investment, but there is no other way to the left.
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