The (Re)Introduction of Lula
Lula leads the ‘March of Victory’ ahead of the October runoff. Source for picture: REUTERS
The recent run-off election in Brazil has been fraught with contention and was the culmination of years of complex partisan tensions. On October 30th, Brazilians went to the polls to either reelect incumbent President Jair Bolsonaro or former President Luiz Inácio da Silva – affectionately known as “Lula.” Bolsonaro’s opponents levied critiques of COVID failures resulting in massive death, his inflammatory statements targeting women and the queer community, and compared him to other far-right populists around the world. Given this recent history, many around the globe anxiously awaited this election’s outcome.
After four years of right-wing leadership under Bolsonaro and Lula’s eventual exoneration and release from jail, da Silva triumphantly took back the presidency. Before running for reelection, Lula spent time imprisoned on corruption charges that were later overturned. The vote breakdown now sits at 50.9 percent for Lula and 49.1 percent for Bolsonaro. For Brazil’s Left, as well as those of the international Left community, the (re)election of Lula was particularly vindicating. But this begs the questions – how much of an outright victory was Lula’s election for the Left within Brazil? Additionally, what does Lula’s election mean for the Left around the world more broadly?
Lula first came to international prominence when he was elected Brazil’s president in 2003 during the Latin American pink tide. This political wave in the early 2000s was a significant shift in Latin American politics, largely rejecting neoliberal economic models, with many countries in the region sharply turning to the left. As a former labor leader, Lula ideologically represented much of this movement.
Coming from a poor, blue-collar background steeped in working-class and leftist political organizing, Lula was actively engaged during the latter years of the Brazilian dictatorship. In the late 1970s, Lula rose to power as a trade union leader and helped organize striking steel workers’ demands for higher wages. Lula was arrested and spent a year in jail for his opposition to the authoritarian military regime. Lula would eventually go on to help found the Brazilian Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT; Workers’ Party), in which urban industrial workers, rural laborers, as well as the poor and unemployed, have managed to build a successful electoral coalition. With the legitimacy and backing of a political party, he helped lead the Diretas Já movement, demanding direct democratic presidential elections, and eventually won a seat in the Brazilian Congress.
Like many other newly leftist colored governments at the time, Lula attempted to use his first two terms as president, 2003–2011, to change the trajectory of poverty and inequality in Brazil. While his administration governed much more moderately than his detractors would have one believe, his social programs lifted millions out of poverty. It’s estimated that poverty fell from 12 percent in 2003 to 5 percent in 2008. Lula also managed to reduce Amazonian deforestation by 83 percent during his tenure as president. The successes of Lula during this time afforded him an 80 percent approval rating when he left office and the accolades of world leaders. President Barack Obama once called him “the most popular president on Earth.”
His time in office was not without controversy, however. During his first term, his PT party, along with others, became embroiled in a vote-buying corruption scandal that resulted in the resignations of many deputies from Congress. Interestingly, Roberto Jefferson, who broke the scandal, was later expelled from Congress for his own ethics violations. Lula maintained he had no first-hand knowledge of the matter. He went on to win reelection in 2006 with high approval ratings, and his Chief of Staff, Dilma Rousseff, succeeded him as president in 2011.
In 2014, however, Lula’s most existential battle came from allegations of illegally collaborating with the state-owned oil company Petrobras. The investigation, known as “Operation Car Wash,” implicated business executives and other world leaders and has been referred to by some experts as the biggest corruption scandal in history. In the fall of 2016, charges accusing Lula of being the mastermind behind the corruption scandal resulted in Lula’s conviction, and he was sentenced to 12 years in prison.
Regardless of Lula’s conviction and imprisonment, he maintained popular support within Brazil and the larger international Left community. Protesters took to the streets in multiple cities and the organization, Free Lula Movement, was formed. In a fortunate turn of events for Lula, after almost 600 days in prison, previously unreported documents came to light and resulted in the overturning of his conviction and release from prison. The information revealed that the prosecution themselves doubted the accuracy of the evidence used against Lula. In addition, unknown conversations between the prosecution and the judge tasked with trying the case pointed to impropriety. The judge, Sergio Moro, offered unlawful instructions to the prosecution on how best to proceed and present their case, and he revealed underlying motives were designed to diminish the power of the PT party and prevent Lula from running for election in the future. Moro was later named Justice Minister in the subsequent Bolsonaro Administration.
A Second Pink Tide?
Political observers have pointed to recent trends in Latin American electoral politics as reminiscent of the pink tide of the late ‘90s and early 2000’s. Now, with the election of Lula, most of the region’s major powers will be led by leftist heads of state: Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Honduras, Mexico, Peru, and Brazil all join a growing leftist bloc in Latin America. As with the first leftist wave, many of these victories are attributed to growing dissatisfaction with the right-leaning governments that swept into power during the 2010’s that failed in their attempts at alleviating inequality and poverty.
Given this new political configuration, what does the future hold for the Left and its ability to deliver the kind of change that voters desire? For Brazil, Lula may have won his race, but he still faces strong domestic opposition. His victory against Bolsonaro was won by an extremely narrow margin, signaling a very divided electorate. Moreover, conservative, pro-business, and pro-Bolsonaro parties saw significant gains in Congress, which they already dominated. Bolsonaro’s Liberal Party (PL) increased its share in the lower Chamber of Deputies by 30 percent, and other right-leaning parties took control of 36 percent of the Chamber. In the upper Chamber, the PL party won 14 out of 27 seats up for reelection, making it the largest party in the chamber. Given the extreme fragmentation of Brazil’s party system, this greatly increases the conservative bloc’s power. In addition, Lula is opposed by a significant number of pro-Bolsonaro governors. To date, out of the 12 incumbent candidates that ran for reelection, 8 Bolsonaro-supported candidates won their elections compared to Lula’s 4 supported contenders.
Making matters worse, the domestic and global economic landscape Lula faces is vastly different from his first tenure. A global commodities boom helped bolster Brazil’s economy during the early 2000’s, which enabled the feasibility of many of Lula’s social programs. These policy initiatives lifted many Brazilians out of poverty. Today Brazil is faced with hyperinflation, rising poverty rates, and continued IMF impositions. While the Brazilian economy has seen some growth, there is not the same level of commodities revenue that helped finance many of the social policy successes of the first pink tide.
The precarity of the economic situation, emboldened political and business elite opposition, high polarization, and the diminishment of Brazil on the world stage means that Lula will likely have to govern largely from the center. While Lula certainly has a history of leftist rhetorical aspirations, as a politician he has generally governed as a pragmatic moderate. Perhaps in an effort to signal a continuation of this route, Lula has chosen a business-friendly centrist, Geraldo Alchmin, as his vice president.
Nonetheless, even with the myriad obstacles before him, Lula maintains that his first priority is lifting up Brazil’s poor. Before the election, Lula penned an open letter to the Brazilian people outlining many of his most ambitious proposals. Among them, Lula has promised to build affordable housing, expand utilities to rural areas, fund major infrastructure projects, enact progressive tax reform, increase the minimum wage, halt deforestation in the Amazon, and increase assistance transfers via his landmark poverty-relief program. Again, the problem becomes: how will Lula be able to deliver these expansive promises? Hostile opposition and the absence of high commodity revenue streams create a very difficult road for Lula in the coming months.
The best scenario for Lula would be a reactivation of the Brazilian economy in which the social safety net can be rebuilt. Realistically, given his constraints, this most likely can only occur through a slower, gradual process. Unfortunately, incrementalism also increases the chances of disenchantment for the Left and the precarious lower classes depending on how long it takes for change to come about.
With Latin American voters choosing change and in need of solutions, the Left once again takes center stage. The actions and rhetoric of Jair Bolsonaro were nakedly authoritarian. Hailing from the military himself, he frequently celebrated the brutal military dictatorship that overthrew the democratic government in 1965. As president, he reinstated military commemorations of the coup that had previously been banned. During his time in Congress, he even heralded one of the regimes' worst torturers as a personal hero and contended the only mistake made was in torturing the opposition instead of killing them. Even today, after the election, pro-Bolsonaro supporters have called on the military to intervene in what they claim was a fraudulent election. It must be noted that there is no evidence of any widespread election fraud, and these assertions are reminiscent of those made by President Donald Trump in 2020 – a close international ally of President Bolsonaro.
The populist authoritarian threat in Brazil should be understood in conjunction with similar threats crystallizing around the world. Their interconnectedness gives them strength and durability. To this, the Left should work to empower voters to elect leaders that govern inclusively and democratically. With the election of Lula in Brazil, perhaps the most immediate threat in the country has been stalled temporarily, but it is by no means defeated.
For the Left in Brazil, hard decisions must be made. On the one hand, tepid moderation can serve to slow progress, exacerbating disenchantment with the political and economic systems. With unfulfilled promises, comes the likelihood of electoral rejection in the future. On the other hand, poverty and inequality have increased and, at the end of the day, people need to feed their families. For the broader global Left, it must stand firm in its core values and not sacrifice what makes it inherently valuable in a complicated world. Social equality, broad-based inclusion, fairness, and pluralism, along with the desire and belief in progress are all what the Left aspires to provide to society.
Most importantly, what the Left offers to the world is democratic freedom. Not the constrained and narrowed idea of freedom that the right espouses, but a truer freedom. What is freedom if a larger and larger proportion of society finds it more and more difficult to economically sustain themselves? Freedom for whom, the few or the many? Brazil and Lula offer a lesson to the world and to the Left everywhere. Our collective democratic ideals are at risk. This threat is real, and it is strong, but there is power in collective solidarity and resistance. This cooperative identity is the power of the Left. In the words of Lula himself, “They tried to bury me alive and I’m here!”