Lula da Silva and his third mandate: the challenges of a very different Brazil

“Brazil is back”. The motto that Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva usually repeats shows that the new president will put international relations at the heart of its management. And he hopes to once again become the leader of the center-left in Latin America.

In his favor he has the letter of his two previous mandates (2003-2010) when Brazil showed strong growth, 4% on average per year, with a clear reduction in poverty, and trampled on world politics and economy.

But the country that sees him now with the presidential sash is very different. Like the world. And the challenges facing the new head of state will be no less.

The leader of the Workers’ Party, who regained the presidential seat by a handful of votes in the second round of the elections -50.9% against the 49.1% of outgoing president Jair Bolsonaro-, will have to implement a delicate political strategy to face the storm clouds that will come from inside and outside the borders.

Exactly 20 years after first assuming the presidency, Lula returns to power in a Brazil that fired him in 2010 with a popularity rating of over 85%, before a corruption scandal sent him to prison and nearly a political grave. in November 2019.

Although the Supreme Court has overturned his sentence, he is still suspected by a large part of the population, despite Lula He claims to have been the victim of political revenge which allowed Bolsonaro’s triumph in 2018, when he was a big favorite.

Lula today finds himself with a country split in two, with 58 million Brazilians who did not vote for him. Two months after the election, The Bolsonarist radicals continue to camp in front of the barracks call for military intervention to prevent him from taking office.

Now it comes with the promise, perhaps borrowed from Chico Buarque’s song, that “tomorrow will be another day.” His campaign was charged with countering “love” and hope for a fairer and more humane Brazil, against “all the darkness” of the four-year government of the far-right leader who left the country on Friday and was not at the recruitment ceremony. But from intentions to concrete facts, the stretch will be long. And complex.

Reposition Brazil in the world

The new president intends rebuild the bridges blown up during the Bolsonaro governmentwhich, at least in its initial stretch, flaunted its “anti-communism” and “anti-globalism” at the hands of then Foreign Minister Ernesto Araújo.

The now former president teased China, Brazil’s biggest trading partner, over the coronavirus. He has spent months criticizing the management of his Argentine counterpart, Alberto Fernández, and relations with the United States have cooled since his “friend” Donald Trump left the White House and Democrat Joe Biden entered.

Bolsonaro’s Brazil has been relegated to the background in G-20 meetings and was no longer invited to the leadership of the G-7, where space is usually given to some emerging countries.

Lula wants to reverse this situation of “international pariah”, according to what he denounced. “Brazil today cannot live in isolation, it must be the protagonist”, she repeated during her acts before taking office. Because of this, will promote regional integration, with the return to the top of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) and the Union of South American Nations (Unasur), and will restore relations with the government of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, interrupted since 2019 by order of Bolsonaro.

Furthermore, he plans to place environmental issues at the center of his management in an absolute departure from Bolsonaro’s policy. Visiting the UN climate summit, COP 27, in Egypt in November, Lula vowed to stop deforestation in the Amazon.

He has appointed ambassador Mauro Vieira, a long-time career diplomat who has already held this position between 2015 and 2016, in the government of Dilma Rousseff to lead the Farnesina.

Trajectory

Brazilians, and especially the poorest, continue to recognize in the new president his more than humble origins, which led his family to migrate when he was a child, from the impoverished interior of the state of Pernambuco, in the northeast, to San Paul. industrial engine of the country.

There he was a shoe shiner and a street vendor, until at 14 he found work as a mechanical turner and became a combative union leader. With his charisma and his political skills, he founded in 1980, in the midst of a military dictatorship, the Workers’ Party (PT), which he still leads today and is still the largest center-left group in Latin America.

After three failed attempts in 1989, 1994 and 1998, he won the 2002 presidential elections and arrived at Palazzo Planalto for the first time on 1 January 2003.

In his mandates he became incarnate a moderate left, with a social vision, but with a strong economic pragmatism, with orthodox recipes that are far from the caricature of a cuckolded communist with which Bolsonarism has tried to dirty him. He has been praised for managing a commodity boom that lifted 30 million Brazilians out of poverty.

But the reality today is different, with the ghost of inflation hovering over the country and the world, under the banner of war in Ukraine.

Aware of the difficulties, to face Bolsonaro in last October’s elections, he surrounded himself with a coalition of ten parties of different ideologies, from the left to the centre-right.

Without going any further, he has chosen as running mate Geraldo Alckmin, his former centre-right opponent, defeated at the polls in 2006. He will also be minister of industry and commerce.

Additionally, Lula chose Senator Simone Tebet, an anti-abortion and conservative landowner who finished third in the first round of the election and is highly respected by agribusiness, a sector that has so far been vertically aligned with Bolsonarism as his Minister of Planning. . .

Tebet will get along together with Finance Minister Fernando Haddad, a PT kidney economist and, for some observers, a possible heir to the current president.

At 77, with his voice broken by the cancer of the larynx he contracted in 2011, Lula returns to power even more moderately, in the face of a financial sector that regards him with suspicion. Over and over again he insists on his commitment to balance and fiscal responsibility, without renouncing his greatest promise: to end hunger, which has skyrocketed in recent years, especially after the pandemic, and which is now affects 33 million Brazilians.

His skills as a political negotiator have been tested in recent weeks, with the composition of his cabinet, which he finally completed last Thursday with 37 ministries (against 23 currently) and 11 female ministers, a record.

The father of five children, he was widowed for the second time in 2017, when his wife Marisa Leticia Rocco, first lady during his two governments, died. Last May, already in the electoral campaign, he married Rosangela da Silva, “Janja”, a sociologist and PT activist, 21 years his junior.

He has since repeated that he has “the energy of a 30-year-old man and the drive of a 20-year-old.”