Vai um café? análise do personagem Lula no programa Café com o Presidente.

Abstract

It presents an analysis of the character Lula in the Brazilian radio program Café com o presidente and its relationship with the type of leadership that populated the Brazilian social imaginary in the first term of the president’s party government. To achieve the objectives, the notions of public image and political mythology are used. From the methodological point of view, the political arena was taken as dramatized space, conducive to scenic performances. It was believed that as in mythical narratives and theatrical plays, participants in the political game behave in public as they were playing roles. In the methodology also the concepts of the New Rhetoric are used, which made possible to analyze discursive strategies that allowed apprehending the character of the public personality of Lula in the radio program Café com o presidente. Here, the discourse has been configured as a place where the symbolic forms and the disputes that they held take shape and materialize. From a microscopic approach, the study was based only on issues produced in the first term of Lula’s governments. The basic argument of the Dissertation is that despite its materiality as an empirical subject, as a flesh-and-blood being that exists in the real world, in the radio program Café com presidente, Lula behaved archetypically as an ordinary man, a dramatic figure concerning the field of social imaginary and political mythologies. From the context of that radio program, it is affirmed that the leadership presented there was not the "real Lula", but an image, a symbolic phenomenon produced in the imaginary and that was manifested by means of the enunciation of a strong political argumentation, aiming the maintenance, control and effective exercise of political power. Despite the structure and appearance, it is defended that Café com o presidente was not an "authentic" radio journalism program, but the place strategically and rationally chosen so that Lula could strengthen and legitimize the image of a simple man and a concerned leader of the demands of "his people". It is argued that Lula is an unequalled communicator, who sees the world from his sensitive experience, and a life story that subjectively brings him closer to the Brazilian electorate, which authorizes him to communicate with the poorer segments using the language of the ordinary man. It is noticed that in that radio program, the enunciator of the presidential speech was not an abstract and universal instance, but a concrete image to who a specific narrative was destined. In the Café com o presidente, Lula’s political discourse, although emotional, was meticulously calculated and conscious, that is, rationalized. In radio, the enunciator of the presidential discourse did not find difficulties to mobilize the imaginary of the poor segments of the Brazilian population. This happened not only because "the real Lula" had experienced poverty, or had acted as a syndicalist or has known the Brazilian maladies closely, but because the character Lula is a knowledgeable exponent of what moves and moves deeply his interlocutors, which allowed him to assume the thematic role of an common man and to place himself as the legitimate representative of the poorer sectors of the Brazilian society. In this dissertation, it is understood that in his radio program, Lula not only put himself in the place of the poor, he matched to his interlocutors and veiled sincerely their dramas. When we proceed to an argumentative analysis of the speeches pronounced there, it is noticed that in reporting his experiences, the former president established a discursive identity with the battlers and the rabble that, taken as protagonists of the governmental action, adhered to the ritual mask that presented them. In the Café com o presidente, the identity and reciprocity between Lula and his audience occurred through the recognition and sharing of subjectivities related to the ways of being, thinking and acting of the strugglers and the rabble. Identity and reciprocity arising from material and cultural deprivation which recognize the tragedy and pain of hunger, establishing by the suffering and stigma of daily and heavy work and, in the case of the rabble, also go through the absence of conditions that allow individuals to elements that can make their lives meaningful.