FEMINIST ECOSOCIALIST PROGRAM FOR THE 2026 ELECTIONS

By the Feminist Sector of Ecosocialistas/PSOL

“They ask me how I got here The truth is I was always here” (Ancestral Territory – Kaê Guajajara)

INTRODUCTION

In our first elections as ecosocialists, we must work to present a programmatic foundation with real substance, whether in candidacies running directly under Ecosocialistas or in the candidacies of our allied current.

This text sets out a feminist program to support our electoral work, one that can and should be enriched by our different feminist practices.

Our aim is to promote candidacies radically committed to ending all forms of capitalist exploitation, oppression, and alienation.

PSOL AND ITS NECESSARY ROLE IN CONFRONTING MACHISMO AND VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN

In Brazil, the machista culture built by patriarchal capitalism and by our colonial, slaveholding legacy still produces, to this day, high rates of inequality and violence against bodies socially read as women — a consequence of the lack of equity across many areas. Every year, hundreds of women and LGBTQIAPN+ people are targeted by violence, victim-blaming still persists in many cases, legal abortion in cases resulting from violence remains under threat, and rape culture continues to be perpetuated. We study more, earn less, work extensively both inside and outside the home, and yet remain deeply underrepresented in politics. And in the labor market, we hold fewer leadership positions, while earning less for doing the same work. Changing this reality is urgent.

These inequalities exist within an intense political polarization, with the neofascist far right on one side. Confronting it depends centrally on defending women’s rights. On one side, we see the rise of a neofascism carrying its old misogyny and religious fundamentalism, now serving new purposes. On the other, feminists in all their diversity are present across the most varied rural and urban movements, fighting for dignity and rights. While Bolsonaro left power, the fascist conservative-right project remains alive — and is even being taken up by many women who use gender parity to advance projects that work against 99% of women.

PSOL has been the party that has most consistently stood up against machista, LGBT+phobic, racist, and ableist violence, while also giving visibility and space to the growth of women, in all their diversity, within politics. In this election, our role will be no different. Our candidacies must serve as trenches of resistance against the advance of the conservative and fascist right, mobilizing women, LGBTQIAPN+ people, Black people, Indigenous people, and Quilombola communities, engaging in dialogue with society as a whole, contesting public opinion, and sowing the seeds of a feminist, anti-LGBT+phobic, antiracist, anti-ableist, ecosocialist, class-conscious, anticapitalist, and revolutionary struggle.

It is essential that PSOL’s candidacies and elected mandates work to bring about real changes in the lives of women in cities, rural areas, and forests, in all their diversity of existence and struggle. PSOL’s presence within institutions must expose the limits of the capitalist state in guaranteeing rights to oppressed and exploited people, and must act as a voice for the struggles of social movements fighting to win those rights.

Within feminist struggles, PSOL must energetically defend every policy that moves toward gender equality and confronts machista and LGBT+phobic violence. But it is important to recognize that struggles for land, water, and housing; against police violence; antiracist, Indigenous, and Quilombola struggles; struggles for public health and education; struggles for the right to free sexual orientation and gender identity as human rights and against homo-lesbo-bi-transphobia; struggles against the growing precarization of labor and the erosion of workers’ rights (such as reduced job security after maternity leave, the weakening of the right to daycare in companies with more than 30 women workers, the raising of the minimum retirement age — made worse by the double workday many women carry, combining paid work with domestic labor and caregiving for children and other family members — and the difficulty of accessing maternity leave due to changes in hiring practices such as forced self-employment and intermittent work contracts), along with many others, are fundamental struggles in which women take on leading roles, establishing themselves as feminist struggles in their own right. Recognizing this is essential if we are to see ourselves within these struggles and to strengthen a radically robust and diverse feminism — one that repositions feminists as a vanguard across multiple anticapitalist and ecosocialist struggles, and, more immediately, in the fight for rights.

Our work as ecosocialists must be guided by a feminism that is class-conscious, antiracist, and attentive to the specificities of the Global South and peripheral economies, one in which the experiences of women in all their diversity, as well as trans and travesti people, are foregrounded. An ecosocialist feminism, in dialogue with feminist ecological struggles, with the struggles of Black feminism — as exemplified by the letter of the Black Women’s March for climate justice at the 30th Conference of the Parties (COP30) — and with the feminism of social reproduction, must be able to understand how gender, race, class, and regional context together shape the multiple determinations behind the climate and civilizational crisis we are living through.

We are not speaking here only of its most visible face: the disproportionate burden borne by rural communities facing environmental racism from major development projects and environmental crimes backed by an extractivist, neoliberal state. We are also speaking of how women, and the space and moment of social reproduction — represented by the care of nature, of new generations, and by the production of goods necessary for material, spiritual, and emotional survival — are subjected to a prior expropriation, ahead of the environmental damage we later read about in the news. These women (and all of us) have been losing their places, territories, ways of life, and culture — losing the possibility of living well.

Our feminism claims the legacy of Luisa Mahin, Thereza de Benguela, Esperança Garcia, Dandara dos Palmares, Aqualtune, Mariana Criola, Lélia Gonzalez, Angela Davis, Sojourner Truth, Claudia Jones, and so many Black women who took up the fight against racism and slavery and for an emancipated life. We also claim Tybyra Tupinambá, Cassandra Rios, Marsha P. Johnson, Felipa de Souza, Xica Manicongo, Dandara dos Santos, and so many other LGBTQIAPN+ people who fought against LGBT+phobic violence and for the right to exist. We claim Flora Tristan, Clara Zetkin, Alexandra Kollontai, Inessa Armand, Konkordia Samoilova, and so many others who joined the feminist struggle to the revolutionary struggle to overcome capitalism. Tuíra Kayapó, the Indigenous warrior who halted the construction of Belo Monte for years, machete in hand; Margarida Alves, rural trade unionist and worker; Dilma Ferreira, killed in Pará after denouncing illegal logging; Nicinha, who denounced the environmental and social impacts of the Jirau Hydroelectric Plant on the Madeira River — these are names we remember in order to claim a popular feminism, socially rooted alongside the most oppressed sectors, one that refuses to give up on overthrowing capitalism and on revolution.

Machista oppression has been used and produced by capitalism as one of its fundamental pillars, walking hand in hand with contempt for human rights. Keeping women oppressed and subordinated helps to lower the costs of reproducing the workforce; increase exploitation and drive down wages for the working class as a whole; maintain an important division within the class, making its domination and exploitation easier; secure the family as an essential mechanism for embedding bourgeois and patriarchal ideology among oppressed people; and deepen the dehumanization and alienation of the proletariat, weakening its class consciousness and, therefore, its capacity to rebel.

Taking up the struggle for gender equality means taking up the struggle for ecosocialism and for the freedom of all human beings. Without feminism there is no ecosocialism; without equality there is no freedom!

PUBLIC POLICY AND GENDER EQUALITY

Throughout history, capitalist governments have acted to perpetuate inequality and oppression, not to weaken them — paying little attention, as a result, to guaranteeing rights for oppressed sectors of society such as the working class and the peasantry in all their diversity: Black people, Indigenous people, women, and LGBTQIAPN+ people. We can say that the capitalist state (the Brazilian state in particular) has historically governed for the few — the very few — generally investing in repressive and assistance-based policies toward oppressed and exploited sectors. We must understand that the absence or scarcity of public policy for these sectors is, in itself, already a public policy aimed at their subordination. This has been the case, for example, with public policies for women — as seen in the heavy responsibility placed on families, and consequently on women, as the primary providers of social protection.

When shaping political disputes or political action without considering women, their needs, the violence they experience, and their specific demands, we necessarily contribute to perpetuating a masculinist and machista politics and world. Thinking about and acting on politics requires asking: Who are women? How do they live? What do they need? Formulating policy for women requires: 1) recognizing the position women hold in society as the near-solitary primary caregivers responsible for social reproduction, a result of capitalism’s structural machismo; 2) recognizing women as targets of machista violence, which calls for policies to confront that reality; 3) recognizing that women are diverse, and that being white or Black/non-white, cis or trans, heterosexual, lesbian or bisexual, young, adult, or older, a mother or not, formally educated or not, from the countryside or the city, from the favela or elsewhere, makes a real difference — and that these positions concretely shape our existence; and 4) understanding that the struggle against machismo requires, and depends on, a joint struggle with ecosocialism and revolution, integrated with antiracist, LGBTQIAPN+, anti-ableist, and ecological struggles, transforming the lives of men and women (cis or trans) within capitalism and toward its overcoming. A world of ecosocialism and freedom is a world that values and includes diversity and its needs.

Public policy can help reduce inequality. First, by recognizing that this inequality exists and that it should and can be reduced; second, by integrating the fight against gender inequality into the government’s agenda alongside the fight against other inequalities; and third, by identifying how and where these inequalities manifest and what their impacts are, so that strategies for action can be planned. Concretely identifying how gender inequalities show up in practice makes it possible to set priorities for action.

But beyond these targeted actions, it is crucial to bring a gender lens grounded in an intersectional perspective — one that recognizes the intersection of class, gender, and race as necessary to capitalist accumulation. Developing this cross-cutting perspective across all social policy for the people is essential. We must also pay attention to the growing migration flows from the Global South and to the feminization and infantilization of their demographic profile, a result of the worsening capitalist and climate crisis that intensifies the vulnerability of women and children. We must consider the bureaucratic, linguistic, and cultural barriers these groups face in accessing social policy, as well as the precarious working and living conditions to which they are subjected.

We understand that public policy should be a privileged space for confronting gender inequality, since it has the capacity to connect with every other sphere of society and government, achieving real gains for women’s lives. It is important not to treat public policy on gender equality as a compartment disconnected from everything else. Implementing effective policy requires action across many spheres of society — the economy, the environment, agriculture, education, health, citizenship, and more.

Developing public policy for gender equality requires politicizing social relations and acting on them. This means that when designing policy for women and trans people, it is essential to think about how their lives unfold across different spaces — at work, in education, in personal relationships, and so on. It requires a careful eye to identify the social spaces where machismo is embedded and to act to dismantle gender inequality wherever it is found.

SOME POSSIBLE STEPS FORWARD

Below, we present some ideas and accumulated proposals that could be incorporated as programmatic groundwork for candidacies and future elected mandates.

4.1. Democracy and Political Participation

Politics is one of the spaces where we remain most severely underrepresented. But beyond institutional politics, it is important to put forward a different kind of politics — collective politics. Working to involve women and LGBTQIAPN+ people in building political life is therefore essential. Creating channels for dialogue with women and LGBTQIAPN+ people, and expanding spaces for popular political participation, is fundamental. In other words: it is not enough to have policy for women — we also need policy made with women and LGBTQIAPN+ people, allowing them to decide on their own needs.

Valuing and expanding spaces of social oversight (society’s involvement) in social policy is a historic achievement secured by the 1988 Constitution, which established mechanisms for social participation in the formulation, management, oversight, and control of public policy. “Nothing about us without us!” We must therefore guarantee and expand spaces such as Councils and Conferences, with broad feminist participation in particular. We must also work to open up political spaces where oppressed sectors can pressure the capitalist state to guarantee rights, while at the same time exposing its limitations in doing so. In our political work within elected mandates, we must foster spaces of radical, popular democracy.

To that end, we defend:

Participatory mandates, with a direct channel for dialogue with the population and social movements.
The struggle to guarantee and expand spaces of popular democracy over decision-making, reaching and involving women and LGBTQIAPN+ people, through Conferences, Public Hearings, and regular community discussion circles.
Incorporating gender, race, and sexual orientation as cross-cutting dimensions in planning, resource allocation, and evaluation of policy and programs.

4.2. For a Life Free of Violence

Every year, Brazil still records alarming rates of gender-based violence. Cases of femicide and killings driven by LGBT+phobia continue to fill the pages of newspapers, almost always claiming Black and low-income victims. Public policy can and must intervene to guarantee a society free of violence against women and LGBTQIAPN+ people. To that end, we defend:

Fighting to strengthen the Care Network for Women in Situations of Violence and to ensure the effective application of the Maria da Penha Law, from a perspective that critically examines punitive approaches and the mass incarceration of Black people — in this case, overwhelmingly young men — while addressing the structural roots of rising violence and the state’s failure to act on it.
Expanding and improving specialized care for women and girls who are victims of violence, and fighting the re-victimization they face within institutional spaces.
Coordinating across levels of government to ensure “Lilac Rooms” and dedicated women’s police stations in every locality, staffed 24 hours a day by multidisciplinary teams made up of women.
Advocating for the training of medical and police professionals in caring for women in situations of violence.
Strengthening and creating programs that provide comprehensive care to women who are victims of violence, such as the Specialized Centers for Women Victims of Violence (CEAM), guaranteeing legal, medical, and psychological support.
Fighting to expand funding for the creation of temporary shelters for women in situations of domestic violence.
Creating job-training programs for women and trans/travesti people in situations of violence, so they can build financial independence from their abuser — a critical step toward overcoming that situation.
Running campaigns against machista violence that inform people about rights (laws) and available resources (police stations, shelters, job-training programs, etc.) and support for victims of violence.
Creating a program focused specifically on violence against girls and adolescents, particularly those experiencing domestic violence or at risk.
Enforcing legislation on violence against women, including the resources needed to do so — the Maria da Penha Law — and enforcing the right to legal abortion (Article 128 of Decree-Law No. 2848/1940, the Penal Code).
Creating legislation that classifies acts of LGBT+phobia, whether by action or omission, committed by public officials as administrative offenses.
Fighting against police violence and for the right to motherhood and to life for Black, Indigenous, and low-income families. Black lives and Indigenous lives matter!
Recognizing the families of incarcerated people — overwhelmingly made up of mothers, wives, and daughters — as key actors in advocating for the human rights of incarcerated people, and ensuring their access to the public policy that supports this work.

4.3. Education Against Oppression

As Paulo Freire said, education alone does not change society, but society cannot change without it either. A public education system that confronts gender inequality is therefore essential. It is critical to guarantee access for women, LGBTQIAPN+ people, and the children of the working class to every level of education, while also questioning how education is structured within schools and universities, and defending a non-sexist model of education.

We therefore defend:

The struggle to defend public, secular, state-funded, free, high-quality, socially engaged, non-sexist, non-racist, anti-LGBT+phobic, and ecological education across public school systems.
The struggle to elevate the history and rights of women within school curricula, and to confront prejudiced, LGBT+phobic, and racist conceptions of knowledge, education, and society.
Support for training teachers and education professionals in an egalitarian approach to education that includes discussion of race, gender, and sexuality — that is, of racism, machismo, and LGBT+phobia within school environments.
Support for an education committed to preserving life and the environment, one that recognizes and values Indigenous and Afro-Brazilian ancestral knowledge.
The struggle to guarantee daycare and childcare spaces in universities, and to develop other policies that support student mothers in staying in school, funded through the public education budget.
Support for implementing admissions quotas for trans/travesti people in higher education.
Support for university hospitals that are 100% public, free, and run by the universities themselves, with research and health care dedicated to women and LGBTQIAPN+ people, including outpatient clinics for trans people within university hospitals.
The struggle for policies that fund scientific research produced by women and about women, tied to the science and technology budget.
The struggle for a creative, emancipatory, and liberatory model of education, geared toward valuing diversity and combating all violence based on gender and sexual orientation.

4.4. Health

Access to health care must be a guaranteed right for everyone, without exception. The Unified Health System (SUS), a hard-won achievement of the Brazilian working class, must be strengthened and defended, and must become increasingly democratic in guaranteeing access to health care for the population in all its diversity, ensuring policies of care for women and trans/travesti people. Repeated budget cuts to the SUS place a heavier burden on the health of thousands of women and LGBTQIAPN+ people.

We therefore defend:

A strong, public, universal, and democratic SUS, with public management implemented across its various levels, guaranteed enforcement of equity policies, and strengthened mechanisms of social oversight, backed by investment, public hiring, and an end to outsourcing.
Dedicated budget allocations for health policy aimed at specific populations, such as: women’s health, Black health, LGBTQIAPN+ health, Indigenous health, and the health of migrants and refugees, among others.
Advocating for stronger scientific research at Brazilian public universities in the field of health, and its integration with the SUS and university hospitals.
Fighting for the legalization of abortion, framing it as a public health issue. Ensuring access to abortion in the cases already provided for by law (rape and risk to the woman’s health), and advocating for the legalization of abortion in all cases. Fighting for reproductive justice that accounts for its racial and class dimensions.
Developing public policy against obstetric violence, which is widely practiced against Black women, Indigenous women, and pregnant people. Collecting data on hysterectomies (uterus removal) performed without consent or with weak medical justification, as well as other forms of violence during prenatal care, childbirth, and postpartum recovery committed against women and trans people within the health system.
Ensuring the principle of equity is put into practice within the SUS, implementing a model of care that recognizes the specific needs of different population groups, including: Black communities, LGBTQIAPN+ people, Indigenous people, Quilombola communities, riverside communities, and migrants and refugees, among others.
Recognizing the gender identity of trans women, travestis, trans men, and non-binary people, and providing the health care these communities need — including guaranteeing the use of chosen names in information and record-keeping systems, training health teams to care for LGBTQIAPN+ people, and expanding gender-affirming care services within the SUS.
Fighting to guarantee and expand the sexual and reproductive rights of women and other pregnant bodies, rights that have been harshly attacked by conservative blocs in the National Congress.
Supporting the creation of reproductive planning policy that includes LGBTQIAPN+ people and respects diverse family structures.
Establishing standardized protocols at rural health posts to identify pesticide contamination, most often reported by women — mothers, wives, and daughters — regarding the health of their families.
Guaranteeing access to information about health and social assistance policy for LGBTQIAPN+ people through comprehensive health campaigns that encourage them to seek care.
Increasing investment in HIV/AIDS prevention campaigns and programs, as well as for other STIs, and making it easier to access the medications needed for proper treatment through the SUS.
Fighting to expand patent-breaking on medications controlled by major pharmaceutical companies, so they can be produced in Brazil at lower cost, reaching the population and easing the financial burden on the SUS.

4.5. Job and Income Generation (Fighting Poverty)

Studies show that although women have become more deeply integrated into formal employment over the past few decades, most women and LGBTQIAPN+ people remain outside the formal labor market — and therefore excluded from labor rights such as retirement, the year-end bonus, maternity leave, and others, on top of bearing the cost of balancing paid work with domestic responsibilities. They also earn less than cis men, face higher unemployment rates, and remain exposed to workplace harassment, a lack of recognition for professions considered “feminine,” and other forms of hardship.

It is therefore essential to:

Invest in training for the female workforce, to open the door for more women to enter the formal labor market and to help raise wages in roles already held by women.
Guarantee equal pay for women. It remains common, even today, for the same job to pay differently depending on whether the worker is a woman or a cis man. Fight racial pay inequality. We defend equal pay for equal work.
Work to eliminate unequal access to and control over productive resources — labor, land, capital, information, new technologies, natural resources, and more.
Fight for equal maternity and paternity leave, and for the recognition of same-sex families and trans people in accessing leave benefits.
Support building public laundries, expanding community childcare spaces, public restaurants, daycare centers, and other services designed to lighten the burden of unpaid domestic and reproductive labor.
Fight to end the repression of street vendors in cities, most of whom are Black women, and guarantee their dignity.
Guarantee childcare subsidies for pregnant people and, wherever possible, on-site daycare at workplaces.
Guarantee that, wherever possible, women, non-binary people, and trans men with children receive priority — when hired through public exams — in choosing their work location and schedule.
Push for mandatory pay equality and gender quotas in leadership positions within the public sector.

4.6. Women and Nature

The climate emergency caused by capitalism’s destructive impact on the environment poses threats to the lives of us all — but especially to working-class, peasant, Black, and Indigenous women, and to traditional communities. In cities, women struggle to protect their families’ well-being in the face of flooding, water shortages, extreme heat, and rising food prices. In the countryside, women confront drought, pesticides, and capital’s ongoing offensive against family-farmed land. In riverside communities, drought and river pollution caused by mining have become a threat to life itself. In forested regions, expanding deforestation, transgenic monoculture, and wildfires put both human and animal life at risk. Compounding all of this is the violence with which the ruling class attacks Indigenous and Quilombola peoples and their lands, seeking to exterminate them and seize their territory. The capitalist crisis is advancing through new waves of expropriation, undermining the very possibility of social reproduction and life itself. Across every one of these biomes and communities, women are rising up to fight, taking on essential leadership roles.

Acting on this front is essential. We therefore propose:

Fostering local dialogue with women fishers, Indigenous women, Quilombola women, and women from forest and rural communities about which laws and policies would be useful in each territory — following the example of the Free Babassu Law, which guarantees women access to babassu palm groves even on privately owned land.
Fighting for budget allocation and policy space dedicated to strengthening family farming, developing agroecology and permaculture, and expanding access to affordable organic food, among other initiatives that support popular, healthy food production. Fostering partnerships between agricultural social movements (such as the MST and MPA) and governments to supply school meal programs. Strengthening community gardens in cities. Defending popular agrarian reform.
Fighting to ban glyphosate and other pesticides with proven health impacts. Fighting genetically modified crops and guaranteeing policy support for popular and community seed banks.
Supporting the creation of plans to cushion the effects of the climate crisis in cities, developing architectural solutions for flooding, guaranteeing access to water, and paying close attention to low-income areas and outlying neighborhoods within disaster-prevention programs. No to environmental racism.
Pushing to strengthen enforcement (and penalties) against the invasion of Quilombola and Indigenous lands, as well as environmental reserves and parks. Fighting illegal deforestation and illegal mining.
Ensuring that, in areas affected by large-scale development projects, environmental impact assessments — both before and after — include a gender perspective, taking into account these impacts on women’s lives.
Expanding research and public policy focused on the mental health of populations affected by dams and large infrastructure projects.
Supporting urban land occupations led by single mothers, on the grounds that they give social purpose to existing structures rather than fueling further demand for construction, cement, gravel, lime, copper, and similar industries.
Recognizing recyclable-material collectors, who are socially vulnerable, for the essential service they provide through recycling.
Strengthening Indigenous, Black, Quilombola, peasant, riverside, dam-affected, waste-picker, environmental, and other movements that join in defending nature and life against the offensives of capital.

“Perhaps, rather than trying to fit ourselves into norms that have historically done us violence, we can take pride in being part of the destruction of certain ways of existing that leave no room for multiplicity. Understanding that, for people deeply wounded by colonial violence, one form of self-defense can be precisely to try to redefine the meaning of family, of god, of respect, of responsibility — and that is one possible path. But we must also remember that giving up on investing in those same systems, and instead creating new words and new meanings, is also a possibility. Part of the work of decolonization is precisely no longer attributing an inherent essence to structures organized in the name of god, of family, in the name of goodness — because it is exactly that belief which drives us to keep repeating them. I want to stress this point to make clear that not everything needs to be redefined; perhaps some systems truly need to be destroyed instead.” (Decolonizing Affects – Geni Nunez)