‘Bolsonaro doesn’t know the Earth is round’: how Lula can win back Brazil
On Wednesday 10 March, Brazil’s former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva gave a rousing comeback speech at the metalworkers’ union headquarters in São Bernardo do Campo, an industrial centre in the São Paulo metropolitan region from where Lula first emerged as a national figure in the 1970s. The day before, in a shocking turnaround that surprised even those convinced of his innocence, a justice on the supreme court annulled the criminal convictions against Lula, rendering him eligible to run for a third term next year.
The ruling in Lula’s favour would have been a major story even if his popularity had faded since leaving office in 2011. But recent polls show that he remains strikingly electable, ahead of the far-right incumbent, Jair Bolsonaro, who won the 2018 election. Other polls suggest a closer race, which is still notable given that Lula has not even started campaigning. Lula also led in the polls three years ago but was barred from running by an infamous judge who went on to join the Bolsonaro administration. For his part, Bolsonaro, a retired army captain who served without distinction in congress for 27 years, has presided over an unmitigated catastrophe. If Latin America’s largest nation was once held up as a model for how to balance economic growth with dramatic poverty reduction, its current leadership seems perfectly content with being a global pariah (the foreign minister literally said as much last October).
From his handling of the environment and the pandemic, to cite a few prominent issues, Bolsonaro has shown himself immune to reason. This is why Lula seemed so intent on reasserting the primacy of facts in his nation’s political discourse during his speech last week. “It is always important to reiterate whenever you can,” he declared, “the planet is round … and Bolsonaro doesn’t know it.” He outlined all the steps he would have taken had he been in office when the pandemic struck, each measure more sensible than the last. Bolsonaro notably continues to downplay the virus even as international observers worry about Brazil becoming a hub for the dissemination of new variants.
Although it is unclear whether Lula will actually run again next year, the very fact that he can has shifted Brazil’s political terrain. Both the current speaker of the house, elected to his influential position with Bolsonaro’s support, and the previous one, a centreright figure whose party has hinted it might endorse Bolsonaro in 2022, signalled an openness to Lula’s rehabilitation. This is a stunning reversal from only three years ago when Brazilian society found itself in the grip of a reactionary groundswell that held progressives responsible for every social ill, real or imagined. The recognition Lula has received from the left and right in recent days can be attributed to his ability to sell a conciliatory message, one rooted not in ideological confrontation but in a reclamation of the basic republican values that Bolsonaro nakedly disdains.
A glaring obstacle remains in the way should Lula pursue the presidency again: international market forces. As reported in Bloomberg, Lula’s renewed political eligibility“sent stocks and the currency cratering, deepening some of the worst performances this year”. Elsewhere, investors told Reuters that “the prospect of Bolsonaro running against Lula pits two ‘populist’ candidates against each other, hollowing out the center ground, which is more fertile for the economic reforms Brazil desperately needs”. Amid the handwringing of observers most attuned to the narrow wishes of private investors, it is worth recalling the obvious differences between the incumbent and the wouldbe challenger who unsuccessfully ran for president three times before finally breaking through in 2002.
Under Lula’s Workers’ party, the Brazilian federal government implemented a flurry of innovative federal policies that transformed the lives of millions of Brazilians. Poverty plummeted, while the number of college graduates soared. Bolsonaro, for his part, whines about his inability to get anything done, pining for the days of military rule. He demonstrates a flippant attitude toward the wellbeing of anyone who is not a blood relative. That he won the presidency in 2018 is a testament not to the appeal of his agenda but to the erosion of basic civility in Brazil. This is the comparison to keep in mind as headlines appear in the months to come – and surely they will – alerting investors to the purportedly worrisome economic agenda of Lula and his party, the same “frightful bunch” who once lifted 28 million people out of poverty.
There have been also been some grumbles from retired military figures about the impropriety of Lula being eligible to stand for office. To his great credit, however, vice-president Hamilton Mourão, a retired general, threw cold water on any talk of conspiracy, saying people have every right to vote for the former president. It remains highly unlikely that a tragic history of military intervention will repeat itself. Lula’s return to the scene has also thrown the centre-right into disarray. For example, João Doria, a former businessman who rode Bolsonaro’s coat tails to the São Paulo governor’s mansion in 2018, announced he may not pursue the presidency after all, recognising the danger of splitting the rightwing vote. Doria’s move is a tacit admission of the former president’s ability to appeal to the broad centre of Brazilian politics.
As in 2002, when Lula promised a plausible social democratic alternative to the deprivations of neoliberalism, his timing might again prove impeccable. There is a feedback loop in his favour – poll numbers indicate that Lula does best against Bolsonaro among opposition figures, thus strengthening his hand as leader of the opposition, and leading to higher poll numbers as other anti-Bolsonaro voters flock to his side. Sensing this momentum, even centreright figures have noted Lula’s ability to build bridges, a dig at Bolsonaro’s inability to do so. Perhaps it is a sign that the establishment that once bet on Bolsonaro to keep Lula’s Workers’ party at bay in 2018 is coming, in fits and starts, to the conclusion that he is no longer worth bringing the country to the brink of collapse.
Andre Pagliarini is a lecturer of history and Latin American studies at Dartmouth College
Now we know that British exports to the European Union plummeted by a cataclysmic 41% after Brexit on 1 January, what next?This is not the “slow puncture” predicted, but a big bang. Yet so far, it registers little on the political Richter scale.
It should shake the government to the core, but voters are well protected from this unwelcome news by our largely pro-Brexit press. Nor does BBC news, under Brexiteer mortar fire, dare do enough to rebalance the misinformation. Saturday’s Financial Times splashed that killer trade figure on its front page, but the Daily Express splashed “Flying start for US trade deal”. There is no “flying start”. Meanwhile, an EU legal action against Boris Johnson is starting this week, for his reneging on the Northern Ireland protocol and thereby imperilling the Good Friday peace agreement.
The Sun, Daily Mail, Daily Express and Daily Telegraph barely cover the EU trade fiascos, says Dr Andrew Jones, part of an Exeter University team monitoring Brexit media stories since the referendum. Currently, Jones says, those papers’ main Brexit story is Britain’s triumph over the EU on vaccines. That trope always omits the fact the UK could have purchased the same volume while in the EU, but it has become the Brexiters’ clinching case.
Prof Katharine Tyler, of the same Exeter team – and currently re-interviewing voters from Lincolnshire, the south west and Newcastle – finds no shifting views in either leavers or remainers. Nor does she expect realworld effects to have much impact given Brexit’s strong connection to national and personal identity. Bad trade news bounces off sovereignty-seekers, for whom any economic price was always worth paying.
Unless people read the Guardian, the Financial Times and a very few others, the Brexit damage is still invisible, with no lorry queues jamming motorways nor empty supermarket shelves: these may yet happen when delayed import controls are imposed next January.
Manufacturers may say they are in “Dante’s fifth circle of hell” but their loss of exports is out of sight of most of the public. Take Seetru, a Bristol industrial valve-maker I’ve followed throughout Brexit. Half its exports were to the EU: as UK exports to Germany fell by a shattering 56%, its managing director, Andrew Varga, finds his products
“stuck for eight weeks in German customs, swamped by bureaucracy, massively clogged”. Fearing the loss of his just-in-time customers, he’s flying his products to Germany at “10 times the cost”.
He calls “doctrinaire and ideological” the creation of a UK kite mark, forcing him to re-register 30,000 products under two systems. “That,” he sighs, “is what they call sovereignty.” Brexit never “took back control” or escaped “Brussels bureaucracy” but instead blocked the borders with impenetrable thickets of red tape.
No extra time, no illegal “grace period” unlocks the impossible Irish conundrum now heading to court. Once out of the single market and customs union there were just two options, both terrible: a UK-splitting customs border between Great Britain and Northern Ireland; or a peace-dealbreaking hard border within Ireland. No wonder Johnson lied about what he had signed.
The only answer is Norway-shaped: putting all the UK into the single market and the customs union restores frictionless trade, with no Irish borders. But Britain is still emotionally miles away from recognising that necessity.
Meanwhile, this Pandora’s box of a Brexit swarms out new pests daily. Take the 83% collapse of a fishing and shellfish industry that was once the Brexit campaign’s talisman. David Frost and Michael Gove seem never to have known that each boatload of seafood needs 71 pages of customs forms; nor did they understand the fatal fish “depuration” rules that left stock rotting on the dock.
Political optics were all that mattered to these brilliant negotiators, so they thought they could abandon the services and the banking sector, despite services making up 80% of our economy and financial services 10% of tax receipts. So City firms have moved £1.3tn of assets to the EU already, and within one month Amsterdam has overtaken the City as Europe’s largest sharetrading centre.
Daily, new stingers fly out of the Brexit box. “Au revoir to au pairs”, mourns the Telegraph, with no visas for student family helpers because they earn under £20,480. The British Cactus Society mourns the loss of its industry to customs barriers. Students mourn the needless loss of Erasmus, its inferior Turing replacement abandoning cultural swaps for teachers.
How’s global Britain doing? We used to be good at soft power, spreading UK influences in culture, language and the ideals of democracy; but that liberal stuff nauseates the most ideological Brexiters. So they swing their wrecking ball at the BBC, the UK’s worldwide voice, cutting its funding level by 30% while putting its cherished independence under sinister attack. The British Council, spreader of English language and culture, is cut too. Even UK collaboration in global scientific research – on antimicrobial resistance and the climate crisis – is halved. Cutting aid to Yemen mid-famine sends a spine-chilling message about what Britain has become.
Refusing the new EU envoy ambassadorial status is a political gesture to keep the Brexit base fired up. Fighting the EU in the courts may be relished by them. The more damage Brexit does, the louder those who Ken Clarke calls “headbangers” yell for “revenge”. Mark