https://www.clarin.com/mundo/dristos-lula-asumen-domingo-presidencia-brasil_0_I8LTw2Sxc6.html

This Sunday Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva takes over the Brazilian government for the third time. It is a historical fact because there is no trace of a similar frequency in the power of the second hemispheric economy. But it is also, and above all, due to the importance of this continent country whose borders touch almost the entire region and is a projector for the fate of neighboring nations.

Inevitable, then, to observe what happens here if we want to guess the future of the rest of the common space. But this novelty does not happen in the best moment of Brazil, nor in that of its environment. The range of disturbing phenomena hovering over the next government is wide and it is not clear whether this politician is a veteran you can check them.

The January 1st ceremony is marked by this circumstance. Symbolic but eloquent, unlike his two previous governments, Lula will take office surrounded by an extraordinary security shield and forced to thank the crowd locked up in an armored car because the polarization in Brazil emerges with levels of terrorist danger.

The police have already deactivated a powerful bomb dropped towards the airport in a tanker, given only by these extremes. In this dystopian Brazil there are still important manifestations, in number and structure, of bourgeois who claim a hit which prevents the coronation of the former president.

Difficult to find antecedents of a company with minorities who wish to break the institutional cycle until they see a politician they hate running the country.

For Lula, this scenario contains a serious question. No one knows whether these desperate demonstrations are the rattle of a cycle or the prologue of a time to come. Outgoing President Jair Bolsonaro has created a socially fractured environment, modeled in detail on that built in the United States by Donald Trump, which attempted a coup on January 6 taking the Capitol with his militia to prevent the hiring of Joe Biden. coincidences.

Bolsonaro, like his New York friend, revolves around the denunciation without evidence of an alleged electoral fraud that removed him from power and shares the populist contempt for alternative discourse. Like the US tycoon, the former Brazilian army captain is neither a liberal nor a republican in the truest sense of the word.

So it ignores the institutional importance of the transfer of command. That is why you will not make the necessary symbols this Sunday. In the same way that Trump at the time or Cristina Kirchner in Argentina did not. For populist thinking there is no significant other. Only theirs have rights.

Lula knows that his most complicated government has been born, which he arrived at with a narrow victory of 1.8% of the votes. That absence of a decisive difference it is a matter of fragility and it is he who supports the story of the deception of the street coup hordes.

At the same time, it explains the overwhelming need for vigorous back-and-forth negotiations with a voracious opposition that controls Parliament, a power that, due to its Brazilian peculiarities, It is central to ensuring the governance of the administration.

strategy games

In all of his electoral campaigns, Lula has followed a kind of recipe. He militated from a leftist, sometimes tumultuous, format and then governed by a pragmatic center. He did so in a campaign to convince the abandoned masses that he embodied the solution to their difficulties. And he complied. But then he supported himself in an almost obsessive control of the numbers of the economy. It was Lula 1.

This time, however, things have turned around. Lula sought the presidency at the head of a broad center-right coalition and with a speech that saved his eight years of tax surplus, high jobs and growth leading to Brazil from 14th to sixth place in the world indicatorhe.

But since he defeated Bolsonaro in the slightest terms, his speech seemed to seek that anti-system and provocateur Lula of the first campaigns who evoked the ravages of Dilma Rousseff’s government. La Lula 2.

This self-referential construction has generated confusion, sometimes exaggerated, especially in the delicate system of accumulation of the country, the Stock Exchange, finances, businesses and people, what we generally call the market.

There was a chill in stock prices and the dollar that followed Da Silva’s every word, especially when it wasn’t necessary collide the tax order with welfare programshe, as if one hinders the other.

In that order, less than a multi-party “Big Front” as proclaimed, built a cabinet with a huge presence of the hard core of the PT, which not necessarily modernized and where he got his economy minister, Fernando Haddad from.

He did so by discarding his friend Henrique Meirelles, who was the one who dabbled in the markets. He would not have allowed the appointment of the minister who has never questioned Bolsonaro’s fiscal messhe chastised the PT privately.

Those sectors of the PT they do not recognize the slight electoral difference that consecrated the government as a deficit; They do not intend to cede shares of power to their allies, nor do they accept the idea that this present is so different from the one that accompanied the success of those two previous administrations.

They still assume, in this sense, that the state must regulate and manage growth. That’s why there are tensions in the stock market and some leaps in the dollar.

Lula’s radical offensive eased when, just a few days ago, Parliament approved his budget and authorized additional public spending of 145 billion reais, about 30 billion dollars, above the permitted legal ceiling.

Enough to finance social assistance for just over 20 million needy families, women heads of households and poor children under five. A seat belt for a social bomb that if it was not guaranteed, it would have sentenced the new government to death.

The Lula three​

With these endorsements, Lula began distributing signs and setting up a pen for his falcons. La Lula 3. In this line it has designated the Ministry of Urban Planning, which deals with the application of the budget, but has a wide range of action range of intervention on critical public spendingor, right-wing Senator Michelle Tebet. A liberal, culturally conservative farmer and politician well attuned to the powerful agribusiness and financial system.

At Industry he has placed his vice-president Geraldo Alckmin, also a pragmatic liberal who has winked at banks and finance companies since he competed with Lula for the presidency in the first decade of the century. which closes a lock of counterweights in the budget equipment.

A construction of concessions that Haddad – his relatives say – is still struggling to postpone despite being a pragmatist himself. But Lula likes to have the last word in any case.

All in all, just as no one knows the fate of far-right radicalism, it is also unclear whether the new government will have management spaces in a first year that It promises to be difficult due to local but also international circumstances.

The new president has tried to guarantee social assistance, because he assumes that he will have to balance the vines of the economy, among other things, by returning the taxes that Bolsonaro withdrew to improve his electoral image. This is called a fix, and it usually hurts those who are forced to exercise it.

Meirelles, who has never attributed to the right-wing leader a minimum of liberalism as he claimed, denounced a couple of months ago that the tax debt left by this leadership is around 400 billion realsalmost eighty billion dollars, more than 4 points of GDP.

The next government will not be able to escape that sword. That’s why Meirelles just suggested to Lula in a column in the press that urgently announce a fiscal anchor. That is to say, the new president does not fall into the mistake of believing that it is enough to reassure his past image of verbosity.

Correcting the equation will have a legible impact on the wallet of the powerful Brazilian bourgeoisie who half-voted Lula only because he despised the misogynist right-wing leader more. It will remind you when things hurt.

It is at this point that another instance of the panic of the owners of money. If the government is cornered, it may be tempted to attempt to ramp up public spending and re-radicalise to achieve it.

If it does, it will produce an initial beneficial impact on production activity, but it will be ephemeral, it will trigger inflation, interest rates and debt as employment falls. The nightmare that destroyed the Rousseff government, which Lula chose to succeed him and which, not surprisingly, she never nominated in the electoral campaign. Hard to assume it was an oversight.
©Copyright Clarin 2022