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THE re-election of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva a decade after he completed his second presidential term has occasioned jubilations in Brazil and beyond. A palpable sense of relief is unavoidable, given the contemptibility of his adversary, but any exuberance beyond that might prove premature.
What has frequently been referred to in the media as an ‘astonishing’ or ‘stunning’ comeback by Lula, as he is popularly known, was predicted, but generally with a wider margin of victory. The difference eventually boiled down to less than two per cent on a turnout of nearly 80pc.
It’s obviously gratifying that the balance tilted towards Lula. But’s impossible to ignore the fact that after four years of Jair Bolsonaro, who rarely sought to disguise his proto-fascist tendencies, nearly half the voters deemed it prudent to endorse him for a second term.
Thankfully, they failed. But they chose this course despite their familiarity with Bolsonaro’s impressive range of obnoxiousness — from misogyny, homophobia and racism to absolute disregard for the environment and arguably the world’s worst pandemic response, with the president both mocking the virus and disseminating dangerous disinformation about vaccines.
Brazil has been reclaimed, but can it also be redeemed?
His enduring popularity means Brazil’s federal parliament is dominated by the far right, and Bolsonaro allies hold power in the nation’s largest and richest states. After he was first elected 20 years ago, Lula neutralised critics who saw him as a secret communist by taking a nuanced approach to the economy that did not scare off the capitalist investors, while using the windfall from the early 21st-century commodities boom to institute social programmes that lifted tens of millions out of abject poverty and enabled access to universities for innumerable families that had once dismissed it as an impossible dream.
Small wonder that he completed his second term with a popularity rating of nearly 90pc. Unlike his comrades-once-removed in the first phase of Latin America’s pink tide, such as Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez and Evo Morales in Bolivia, Lula was also moderately successful in not alienating the region’s ideological predator, the United States. Barack Obama hailed him in 2010 as “the most popular president on earth”.
But Lula will return in January to the helm of a rather different and far more polarised Brazil. The divide he managed to bridge between social democracy and neoliberalism will seem like a cinch compared with the present cliff between ideologically diverse democrats and the votaries of authoritarianism.
The phenomenon isn’t by any means exclusive to Brazil. Particularities differ, obviously, but similar tendencies have been witnessed in various parts of the world, from Europe to India and Pakistan. For instance, those who cannot summon up the common sense to detach themselves from the myth of Imran Khan as some kind of saviour might find it worth noting that Bolsonaro, too, came to power with the declared aim of cleaning up politics — yet, after losing his presidential immunity next year, faces the prospect of being charged with embezzlement of public funds and theft of staff wages.
Partly because of this risk, Bolsonaro’s two-month lame-duck phase will be closely watched. The ‘Trump of the tropics’ went to great lengths in recent months to claim that anything other than an electoral triumph was inconceivable without cheating by his adversaries. He has no qualms (like Imran) about a military coup to foil his foes — but the armed forces, which brutally ruled Brazil for more than 20 years in the recent past, have offered no indication of reconsidering their avowed neutrality.
Until the time of writing, Bolsonaro, far from conceding defeat or congratulating the winner, had not uttered a word after the election result — leaving both opponents and supporters on tenterhooks about what he might have up his sleeve. Two months is a long time for making mischief (à la Donald Trump), and the transition period will be watched with a measure of trepidation.
In his victory speech on Sunday night, Lula declared: “They tried to bury me, but here I am alive” — referring to the dismissed corruption charges against him and his nearly 600 days in prison. Had he been allowed to run in 2018, Brazil might have avoided Bolsonaro altogether. Now, Lula is adamant that in the world’s third biggest producer of food, “millions of men, women and children don’t have enough to eat”.
He might not be able to work miracles, but a sharp shift away from Bolsonaro’s priorities will be welcome enough. As one Lula voter sensibly put it, “He’s not the solution to every problem. But he’s our only hope.”
The seeds of that hope were firmly implanted four decades ago when a despondent union leader turned up in Havana after having lost the 1982 São Paulo gubernatorial election. “Listen, Lula,” Fidel Castro told him, “You don’t have the right to do this to the working class. Get back into politics!” Thankfully, he did.
Published in Dawn, November 2nd, 2022
