Poverty, housing and the Amazon: Lula’s intray as president-elect of Brazil
The euphoria of an election victory is fleeting and while many Brazilians will wake up with a hangover after celebrating the defeat of Jair Bolsonaro, president-elect Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva will soon have his own headaches to deal with.
Lula takes power on 1 January 2023 and will be charged with rebuilding and reuniting a nation that has been left damaged and bitterly divided after four years of Bolsonaro’s anarchic far-right policies.
The challenges are immense: 33 million Brazilians face acute hunger and 100 million live in poverty, the highest numbers in years. Bolsonaro’s policies, particularly in the Amazon, have led to Brazil becoming an international pariah.
Lula addressed these and myriad other issues in his victory speech but made it clear his first priority was the one that has accompanied him throughout his long political career: improving the lot of Brazil’s poor.
“We can’t accept it as normal that in this country millions of men, women and children don’t have enough to eat,” he told an adoring crowd. “If we are the world’s third biggest producer of food and the biggest producer of animal protein … we have the duty to guarantee that every Brazilian can eat breakfast, lunch and dinner every day.”
The speech was a more emotive version of a letter he wrote to the Brazilian people last week outlining his priorities.
The letter is filled with ambitious – critics say barely credible – proposals, including equal pay for men and women, clearing all waiting lists for surgeries and medical exams, and getting every infant a place in creche.
The plan was issued without any clear details or costings, but Lula is betting that voters will trust he can repeat his feats from 12 years ago when he left power with approval ratings above 80%.
Like his vow to eradicate hunger, many of his promises are similar to those he made during his first terms in office between 2003 and 2011.
He is promising to build more affordable housing, and take electricity and water cisterns to unconnected and far-flung villages.
Major infrastructure projects like public transportation, energy and water will also be managed as before, with the state banks providing funding.
He has promised tax reform and an increase in the minimum wage.
In a revamp of the internationally lauded Bolsa Familia poverty-relief program, the poorest families will get 600 reais ($110) a month and those with children under six years of age will get an additional 150 reais ($30). The handout comes with a requirement to keep children in school and get all vaccinations.
Quite how he does it all is still an open question – and a very big one.
The commodities boom that financed many of his programs the first time around is over, and he will face a hostile Congress, where Bolsonarismo remains strong.
Many prominent backbenchers are funded by agribusiness and they could be a major obstacle in what will be one of Lula’s highest priority areas, the Amazon.
Deforestation has increased every year since Bolsonaro took power. Lula will halt Bolsonaro’s developmentat-all-costs policies that encouraged ranchers, prospectors and loggers to besiege the Amazon and plunder its natural resources.
He promised to “aim for zero deforestation” but will be satisfied if his government can lower deforestation by 83% as was seen under Lula and Dilma between 2003 and 2014.
Much focus will also be on Indigenous issues. A quick rebuild of the Indigenous and environmental organisations that were hollowed out by Bolsonaro will signal just how serious Lula’s government is and will also help combat deforestation.
“Instead of being world leaders in deforestation, we want to be world champions in facing up to the climate crisis and in socio-environmental development,” Lula said. “That way we will have healthy food on our plates, clean air to breathe and water to drink and lots of quality jobs with green investment.”
The focus on reindustrialisation and public works projects might be necessary but they are also a sign of how Latin American politics has failed to fully grasp 21st-century realities, said Shannon O’Neil, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.
“What I find dispiriting sometimes for the future of Latin America is that the kind of discussions they are having is based on 20th-century economies,” O’Neil said, without naming Lula directly.
“It is not about human capital, which is really the future of any workforce, it is not about automation or creating intellectual property, or research and development. Too much of it is about looking back at economies that are disappearing. It is not what the next 25 years are going to bring.”