After completing his first hundred days in government, Lula da Silva made the question of the war in Ukraine into one of his central identity constructions. For many analysts it is not clear whether this decision derives from a extraordinary diplomatic impertinence or product of ingenuity. Or both.
that’s what it suggests The Economist to try to explain why the newly arrived third government of the PT leader got confused in that conflict, leaning towards the Russia narrative.
Lula is justified behind the ambition to restore Brazil to the place it occupied in international agenda 20 years agoin his first two presidencies. A different world, therefore, whose nostalgic luminosity could prevent us from detecting the rough paths of this present.
That look would be dulled even more by the internal complications deal with the government. The PT’s victory over Jair Bolsonaro was by a slight difference reflected in the absence of parliamentary power and the building of a center-right cabinet that connects with the country it is to govern.
A Brazil with a middle-class constituency that largely elected him not to support the misogyny and illiberal bigotry of the far right In other words, he opted within limits for who he believed to be the most liberal in comparison, not the most leftist, a concept that Lula, far from 1970s folklore, buried in the electoral campaign perhaps forever.
It is a space where the president does not feel uncomfortable. First, in his two governments, played both ends of the fan. He promoted an orthodox economic policy that strictly controlled government spending, corporate profits and twin surpluses, while embracing Cuba’s Castros, conversing as if he were an equal with Hugo Chávez, Nicaraguan Ortega, or the Kirchners of Argentina .
A shortcut to dissolve internal risk. That platform today is no longer what it used to be, those players are not there, at least not with the same leading role. War could then have tempted to show those rebellions.
Lula’s veteran international adviser Celso Amorim is credited with this controversial turn and locked to east-west parameters the last century.
This view, common in the self-perceived regional progressive, conceives of the Ukrainian drama as an American battering ram against Russia, which, although no longer the fabled Soviet Union, continues to pit itself against the United States, the hateful cold war empire.
The main Chinese dish
But it is not Russia but China that above all attracts the leader of the PT, solicited with less ideology for growth that solves a economic reality of limits.
Brazilian officials heed US criticism of these mutations, but blame Washington for a great verbosity but little practical coherence.
Lula’s recent tour of China left $10 billion in investment. A few weeks earlier, the meeting with Joe Biden in the White House ended with zero monetary commitments. Even worse, it is noticeable persistent exit of North American investors from Brazil.
Paradigmatic of this cycle is the carmaker Ford, which left the country two years ago and is now selling its huge plant in Bahia to the Chinese BYD, which according to Bloombergwill produce electric cars there.
The intention of Lula and his team, diplomatic sources tell this reporter, is to promote these investment decisions with a multiplication of plants, technological agreements, exchange in national currencies and a almost total economic alliance with the People’s Republic.
This pragmatic step is easy to understand. he is not so much slip on Ukraine. It is unlikely that they asked Lula as much as compensation. After his tour of China, the PT leader surprised by insisting to equate Kiev with Moscow in responsibility for the war. He confused the victim with the perpetrator.
It’s a serious idea that I had already reviewed in an interview with the magazine last May Time, ahead of the election, in which he freely stated that Ukrainian President Volodimir Zelensky “wanted war. If he didn’t want her, he would have bargained a little more. That’s how it is.” Negotiation?!!
This polemical view ignores the fact that this is not a classic conflict with armies traversing battles from one border to another. What happens is that Russia has invaded Ukraine and for a year demolish that country, massacring civilians, their homes, hospitals and schools to demonstrate an alleged right to command the Kremlin over all that space that belonged to the USSR. Not just Ukraine.
That’s why the world watches scared this scenario repudiates Moscow and is in solidarity with Kiev. Ukraine, it is worth remembering, is neither Vietnam nor Korea.
Lula entered this drama with a wrong foot, exposing a unnecessary damage to Brazil’s image as a defender of human rights and alienating the European public opinion which had welcomed him with applause.
A higher cycle of this deterioration has been the Brazilian’s criticism of the United States and Europe for providing military aid to Ukraine and sanctioning Russia. But without those two tools, Lula knows, Putin he would immediately win the war.
A couple of days ago, Amorim spoke on the phone with US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan to clear up what he called misunderstandings and to remark that Brazil does not support China’s view of the war, let alone Russia’s. But those words collide with gestures.
Interestingly, the PT leader came to the Brazilian government with great enthusiasm from the White House, uneasy with Bolsonaro and the intimate relationship of the far right with Putin which he visited days before the start of this war which he never condemned.
Right after the PT win, Joe Biden rushed over to say hello to Lula thus dissolving the fraud claims that the outgoing president was rebelling.
Following that signal, a delegation led by Sullivan immediately arrived in Brasilia to invite the president-elect to Washington, an appointment that took place after the January 1 inauguration in which both presidents they condemned the war and Moscow.
In those days an agreement was born between the two major economies of the hemisphere with a common concern for the crisis of representation that is tearing the region apart.
Moreover, with an evident US interest in building an alliance that will moderate the determined advance of China and to a lesser extent Russia in Central and South America. That society of mutual trust is what has been broken. It’s clear that if there were ingenuity it would not be only Lula’s.
Submarines and nuclear power plants
Brazil’s ties with China they are unstoppable. Even the technology of the People’s Republic, Huawei’s 5G in force here since 2021, aims to flood the communications structure and the rudiments of Internet of things of the South American giant.
Huawei has already done this two equipment manufacturing plants for telecommunications in São Paulo. One of them is a smart factory that opened in March 2022.
On the Russian side, there are other aspects not covered by the media that promise an even more marked confrontation with Washington. Lula, aligned on this aspect with Bolsonaro’s efforts with Moscow, seeks the support of Moscow’s atomic energy sector for the supply of fuel for the reactor of the nuclear powered submarine of the country that will start operating in the next decade.
as he remembered Folha de São Paulo, the president wants to maintain contact with Rosatom, the Russian state-owned company leader in the world reactor market, for the resumption of construction of the Angra 3 nuclear power plant, the larger of the other two namesakes that are in operation.
The Russian company has already applied with certain guarantees for this job in competition with the American Westinghouse, the Chinese CNNC and the French EDF. Work on the plant has been paralyzed since 2015 due to allegations of corruption at the Brazilian state-owned company Eletronuclear during the failed PT government of Dilma Rousseff, in jato lava times.
These issues, and not just the fate of the war in Ukraine, were an important part of the agenda of the meeting held last Monday in Brasilia by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov with my colleague Mauro Vieira and the president Lula himself.
A visit that took place in the midst of international repudiation for that presence welcomed with praise by the Brazilian government and which proclaimed itself satisfied many common interests that unite both countries.
©Copyright Clarin 2023
BRAZILIAN. SPECIAL DELIVERY
Source: Clarin
Mary Ortiz is a seasoned journalist with a passion for world events. As a writer for News Rebeat, she brings a fresh perspective to the latest global happenings and provides in-depth coverage that offers a deeper understanding of the world around us.