Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva accomplished his feat and was crowned this Sunday for the third time as president of the second largest economy in the hemisphere. The act, which was carried out with an extraordinary security shield due to the activity of far-right groups, was particularly marked by the tone of the two similar speeches, in Congress and in the presidential headquarters, with which Lula presented his government.

On the one hand, he accused his predecessor, the right-wing populist Jair Bolsonaro, with enormous severity, and described the state of the country this administration has left as “alarming”. “Devastation”, “dismantling”, “destruction” and repeatedly “stupidity”were the words used by Lula to refer to that government.

The other axis he highlighted was the denunciation of inequalities and the reappearance of hunger in the country, pointing almost all of management forward, according to what he said, to resolve those inequalities. In this sense the messages were emotional and seemed to continue the fervor of the campaign.

The ceremony covered the entire Ministries Esplanade with around 300,000 people according to police estimates. Most of the people wore red shirts or hats, the original color of the PT which later in the campaign had changed to white, in an attempt to capture the moderate vote of the centre-right.

19 presidents and heads of government attended, among about 160 delegations from all over the world. The United States has sent its interior minister and China its vice president. At night there was a musical show.

The day passed uneventfully, but there was concern about the possibility of accidents. Lula, on the other hand, refused recommendations to wear one bulletproof vest or use an armored car for the traditional journey from the stunning cathedral designed by architect Osca Niemeyer to the Congress and Government Palace in Planalto.

Instead, he preferred to board the traditional Rolls Royce convertible in which he traveled with his wife Janja and the wedding of Vice President Geraldo Alckmin and his wife.

Custody

A large guard watched the movement of the car. Police also shot down about four drones that entered the concentration area and arrested one individual who entered the place with a dagger and fireworks.

The ceremony had a peculiar feature: Bolsonaro traveled to the United States on Thursday at evade handing over gang tokens to his successor. Nor did the vice president fulfill that task, which ended up being resolved by presidential protocol.

The new president’s messages were met with applause from the crowd and his political allies. He underlined the urgency now to resolve the social imbalances, but he avoided offering details about his economic policies to achieve that goal. He pointed out that “5% of the population concentrates the income of 95%”.

With a sob in the second speech at Palazzo Planalto, the seat of government, he recounted situations of urgent need in sectors of the population. “Dear friends, in 2003 (your first government), we made a commitment to recover the dignity and self-esteem of the Brazilian people and we did it”, remembered.

At that moment, he emphasized, raising his voice, what time “inequality and extreme poverty, hunger, are back, not by the work of nature or divine will. Hunger is the most serious crime of all those committed against the Brazilian people”.

“Everything built in eight years it was destroyed in half that time”, he lamented, alluding to his two governments and that of Bolsonaro. “A small part of the population has everything and the other sector lacks everything, and there is a middle class that has become impoverished,” he insisted.

He then pledged, with his vice-president Alckmin, a liberal politician but deeply allied, to resolve social imbalances. “If we want to build our future and a developed country, there cannot be room for so many inequalities, the greatness of a country lies in the joy of its people”.

In the two messages he underlined that he will not govern only for those who voted for him. Lula da Silva won with a minimum difference of 1.8% of the votesThe country was literally divided into two similar parts.

Then, he underlined that “there are not two Brazilians, only one, I will govern for the 215 million Brazilians” and asked that polarization be overcome, that families be reunited. Clarified this there will be no revenge or revenge but that justice will act to punish the disastrous management of the pandemic which has caused 700,000 deaths due to Bolsonaro’s “obscurantism and denialism”.

Lula will pursue a policy of integration in the region without ideological limits, although his foreign minister Mauro Vieira has pointed out to this envoy that the president understands that any politician who seeks to govern for more than two terms he is a dictator. A comment involving Nicolás Maduro’s Venezuela or Daniel Ortega’s Nicaragua.

Underneath the speeches is the reality that the new government will have a rough road, particularly in its first year. The markets, however, they trust the president’s traditional pragmatism. It is because Da Silva will govern with an opposition-dominated Congress where the first minorities belong to Bolsonaro’s Liberal Party.

The one who does business

But even so, the former metallurgical unionist succeeded negotiate a $30 billion extension on the legal ceiling of public spending. That figure, which is even higher if you include other additional ones, is sufficient to finance the subsidy plans that allow you to extinguish the social bomb that you denounced in your speeches.

It was a central step, since as most of the economists present here homogeneously point out, the government will have to solve almost timeless serious fiscal challenges, originated in the budget imbalances left over from the previous government.

Lula, for example, should replenish taxes that the outgoing president retired to improve his electoral image ahead of the election. Also, try to keep inflation at current levels of around 6% a year, which would need to fall even more to meet the targets set by the Central Bank.

Bolsonaro and his economy minister, monetarist Paulo Guedes, have managed to control the cost of living even with electoral criteria, artificially force fuel prices down by withdrawing taxes from that item.

This Sunday it became known that the new government at least two months will be granted to study those allegations. The problem is that solving this problem constitutes a potential wear and tear, explains Marco Antonio Teixeira, a political scientist at the Getulio Vargas Foundation. “The price of fuel affects the prices of food, public transport and quickly reaches the budget of the poorest, above all,” he said.

In this sense, Lula addresses the need to make a number of adjustments, hence his concern to contain the social crisis. Bolsonaro has not left the budget lines foreseen to support the assistance plans that go to 20 million poor families.

Lula, in this sense, formed a cheap equipment with counterweights. He chose a hard-core PT politician, Fernando Haddad, as area minister, but put Alckmin alongside him in Industry, taking advantage of his proximity to the markets. Conservative senator Simone Tebet has been appointed to Planning, the strategic ministry that applies the budget maneuver and intervenes on public spending lines.

That design would have sought to limit one’s hawks and show signs of future pragmatism. It is that this time there will be no momentum with which Lula managed to lead his country from position 14 to sixth by world economic size.

​These shortcomings are what removed the stock market price and the dollar, reaction that could repeat itself this week based on the tone of the president’s messages upon his inauguration.
Brasilia. Special delivery