starting this Sunday begins a coexistence in Brazilas happens in some parliamentary systems, but certainly without the buffers provided by those models.
Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva returns for the third time to Planalto, a real feat for this pragmatic former trade unionist metallurgist who until four years ago had eroded his power and ended up in a prison, stuck in a complex and glassy process of corruption.
But the PT leader shouldn’t be satisfied with this victory. The slight difference of less than two points that the voters gave him compared to President Jair Bolsonaro, reward with caution the memory of his two good presidential administrations.
It also avoids openly punishing the president’s controversial and often grotesque behavior. He weighed an economy with low inflation, falling growth and unemployment. It is a rather political message that requires attention.
The power of Bolsonaro
The vote clearly removes the head of state from power, but it leaves him in a position of strength with an extraordinary collection of votes and the victory of the allies in relevant states such as São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Minas Gerais, in addition to the control of minorities in the Senate and Deputies.
The ballot boxes thus consecrate the existence of two dominant forces. One who defines himself in the Brazilian political center, largely forced to this turn by the need to channel a profound change that the country’s society is experiencing and that Lula is leading. The other, on the far right, whose models are figures like Donald Trump or Viktor Orban and a persistent propensity for republican questions, but that won’t go away.
Both will henceforth be forced to do so an awkward coexistence but inevitable. A period is born in which the negotiation will measure each step, and its success will depend on the voracity of the opponent.
The leaders of Lula’s movement usually conform to the history of political transfugism that exists in the country and especially in Congress. There it is legislated many times with Windowsin the sense of the strong lobby that is on the table in the power bags.
They suggest that all or almost everything can be fixed through compromise, a system that even Bolsonaro has made his own. But much of the trouble Lula had with the law stemmed from the belief that these political evils were inevitable.
There is a lot of this observation in the poll results. There was a multiplied demand on the president-elect during the campaign the absence of self-criticism for extraordinary corruption which has grown mainly in the last two PT governments led by Dilma Rousseff.
Also due to the enormous economic and social crisis that, as it deepened, generated a huge vote against that ended up crowning Bolsonaro, an obscure legislator and former army captain, without great results in any of these tasks. It probably also influenced this Sunday’s limited voteLula’s refusal to define his future business team and essentially his program.
There are several chasms to be resolved in this dimension left by Bolsonaro, both politically due to the tense format of future powers, but also financially. for a tax loophole that will require at least $ 70 billion to be resolvedan expense that will involve a painful cascade of cuts.
Henrique Meirelles, former president of the Central Bank in both administrations, author of the legal cap on public spending and a prominent figure in the next government, recently said that it is possible to calculate a license above the allowable expenditure of up to 20 billion dollars. , no more, to dampen that short fuse bomb.
what’s coming
Is not enough. There is another explosive scenario that requires urgent solutions, in particular the mass of over 30 million destitute people and with problems with access to food. The social assistance programs that Bolsonaro launched to improve his electoral profile lack budget lines to finance them. But they cannot be stopped.
Lula you will have to trade millimeter by millimeter with this fierce opposition in order not to be set on fire in an economic and social crisis that will completely inherit it. And it will do so in a region that teaches that there is no more patience or a thousand moons with governments arriving, as Colombia and before Chile showed.
Internationally, US President Joe Biden’s quick recognition and congratulations to Lula unmask Washington’s interest in this political turnaround in Brazil. The search for a point of reference in a region plunged into an abysmal crisis from Cuba to southern South America is part of a strategy that had no cause in the Bolsonaro administration but not even in the rest of the governments.
The outgoing president had no ties to the neighborhood, with few exceptions. He was also good with the White House. which was deepened by Bolsonaro’s proximity to the Kremlin even well after the start of the war against Ukraine.
It is not for this reason, but it is symptomatic that the United States has not yet appointed an ambassador to Brazil pending the outcome of these elections. The other chapter that weighs more abroad than in this country is the fate of the Amazon, a world lung extremely mistreated by Bolsonaro that Lula promised to protect.
For the region, Lula’s victory is to be viewed with greatness dose in moderation and avoid confusion but above all comparisons that usually fail.
Source: Clarin
