How Lula's victory could end Brazil's global isolation

[MCP]

https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/brazil-how-lula-victory-could-end-global-isolation

Lula will seek to establish the country as an intermediary in international negotiations, recommit to multilateralism, and undo the damage inflicted by Bolsonaro

Former Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva is pictured in Brasilia on 29 July 2022 (AFP)

The dust has settled in Brazil, and even if President Jair Bolsonaro and his most radical supporters still won’t admit it, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has won the election. While the ballot was closer than his supporters might have liked - 50.9 percent to 49.1 percent - Lula still won by more than two million votes, despite reports of voter suppression by pro-Bolsonaro forces and the outgoing president’s recent multibillion-dollar spending spree aimed at buying votes.

While protests and road blockades calling for a military coup were still ongoing this week, their numbers were gradually dwindling. Regardless, the sight of thousands of Brazilians pushing for a military coup, with some protesters reportedly performing a Nazi salute to a rendition of the country’s national anthem, has been disturbing, to say the least.

Almost as disturbing has been the tacit or explicit support for these anti-democratic protests by police. Frustrated with their reluctance to act, members of the public, including groups of football fans, have taken it upon themselves to clear the blockades. The prospect of a successful coup grows more unlikely by the day, as Bolsonaro’s powerful allies have accepted the election results and are seeking to begin the process of an orderly transition.

But what does Lula’s victory mean for the rest of the world? After results were announced on Sunday evening, world leaders from China to the US to Russia swiftly offered their congratulations to the incoming president. Under Bolsonaro, Brazil has gone from a respected international actor known for its commitment to multilateralism, to a pariah state shunned from important summits. Brazil has never been more isolated in its modern history.

Bolsonaro and his supporters have somewhat relished their pariah status, breaking all diplomatic norms by involving themselves as openly partisan actors in American politics, such as by supporting former US President Donald Trump’s challenges to the 2020 election results. Bolsonaro’s fallings-out with world leaders have been very public, such as his row with French President Emmanuel Macron over an Amazon aid package.

Truculent foreign policy

Perhaps nowhere was Bolsonaro’s aggressively truculent foreign policy more evident than in the Middle East. Brazil enjoys strong cultural and historical ties to the region, housing a massive diaspora Arab population of more than 11 million people. Lebanese culture in particular has become part of Brazil’s national identity, from food to music, with the Lebanese community in Brazil today estimated at between seven and 10 million people. Former President Michel Temer is of Lebanese ancestry, as are other prominent politicians.

Since the start of the Syrian war, there has been a new wave of immigration from the region, with Syrian restaurants becoming a part of Sao Paulo’s streetscape. Around 70,000 Palestinian refugees also live in Brazil, with the Palestinian flag and struggle constituting a standard part of left-wing politics.

Supporters of Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro march in Estreito on 2 November 2022 (AFP)

In 2010, under Lula’s past presidency, Brazil recognised Palestinian independence. Lula proved a reliable ally of the Palestinian cause, becoming the first head of the Brazilian state to visit Palestine. This continued under his successor, Dilma Rousseff, whose government condemned Israel’s offensive in Gaza in 2014 and rejected settler leader Dani Dayan’s nomination as ambassador for Israel.

One of the few countries where Bolsonaro found international support was Israel. In recent years, the Brazilian far right - in large part due to the rise of evangelical Christianity - has embraced Zionism as both a symbol and a cause. The Israeli flag is now a standard part of the Bolsonarista aesthetic. Bolsonaro’s wife, Michelle, cast her vote on election day wearing an Israeli flag T-shirt. Bolsonaro himself even once stated: “My heart is green, yellow, blue and white”, referencing the colours of the Brazilian and Israeli flags.

A welcome change

As journalist Eman Abusidu noted in Middle East Monitor, under Bolsonaro, Brazil became Israel’s “new best friend”. Bolsonaro had even vowed to move Brazil’s embassy to Jerusalem, although he never delivered on that promise.

After Bolsonaro’s election victory in 2018, a senior diplomatic source told Haaretz that “Brazil will now be coloured in blue and white”. Bolsonaro made an official visit to Israel shortly after taking office, and Brazil became one of the few states that would defend Israel at the UN.

Lula’s return to power will represent Brazil’s return to the world. Lula had left office as one of the most popular elected leaders in history, and was so well-regarded that he was famously referred to by former US President Barack Obama as “the man”. During the election campaign, he frequently referenced his role in managing the Iran nuclear file and the increased role Brazil played in Africa, although it’s not clear whether these issues played any significant role in getting out the vote..

Lula has signalled that he will recommit Brazil to honouring human rights, both at home and abroad, and protecting the environment. After Bolsonaro’s many attacks on LGBTQ+ rights, Black Brazilians and Indigenous people, and his systemic undermining of any attempts to protect the Amazon from deforestation, this is most welcome.
Lula will seek to establish Brazil as an intermediary in international negotiations, recommit to multilateralism, and undo the damage inflicted by his predecessor - but the real challenge will be governance at home. Meanwhile, the world can at least rejoice over Brazil escaping its self-inflicted international isolation through the rejection of a far-right leader at the ballot box.

Brazil is also a favourite for the Qatar World Cup, which starts this month - and a sixth cup would mark a good start for Lula’s presidency.

 

[MCP]

Brazil elections: Lula has struck a blow against the far right

The narrow victory of the left-wing veteran in Brazil caps a year of major victories against the far right across the continent

www.middleeasteye.net

Brazil elections: Lula has struck a blow against the far right

Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva holds the hand of his wife, Rosangela 'Janja' da Silva, after winning the presidential run-off election, in Sao Paulo, Brazil, on 30 October 2022 (AFP)

The narrow victory of the left-wing veteran in Brazil caps a year of major victories against the far right across the continent

The victory in Brazil of left-wing candidate Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva over incumbent far-right president Jair Bolsonaro is a historic turnaround in South America’s largest country, of 216 million.

A collective sigh of relief could be heard among progressive commentators that accompanied the celebrations on the streets of Sao Paulo and other cities in Brazil, even as Bolsonaro failed to recognise his defeat. The one-term president “apparently isolated himself in the presidential palace, refused to speak with his ministers, and went to bed”, according to reports.

He may be waiting to see if the result will stick. Following the vote, pro-Bolsonaro truckers blocked highways in protest at the result in a warning that the election will not be accepted by hardcore partisans of the president.

Lula, a veteran trade unionist before he entered politics, was imprisoned in 2018 in a controversial corruption case that earlier brought down his successor, Dilma Rousseff. She was impeached and removed from office in 2016, a ruling that critics saw as a form of so-called lawfare - the reversal of the popular vote by use of the courts.

After serving two years in prison, Brazil’s Supreme Court overturned Lula’s conviction in November 2021, opening the way for him to stand as president again, aged 76 (he turned 77 three days before his victory on Sunday).

Lula’s first election win in 2002 saw a rapid expansion of welfare payments to millions of poor Brazilians, enabling him to serve two terms before Rousseff won for his Workers’ Party in 2010. He also curtailed the destruction of the Amazon rain forest by loggers, miners and ranchers, a policy overturned by Bolsonaro, whose conservative base included many from the vast agricultural states of Brazil’s interior.

Supporters of President Jair Bolsonaro, mainly truck drivers, block the Via Dutra BR-116 highway between Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, on 31 October (AFP)

Given how close the vote was, with a 51-49 victory to Lula, that base remains very much intact, and may yet cause serious problems for the new government. As Ahmed Said Mourad, the former deputy of Sao Paulo's parliament, told Middle East Eye before the election: "We also can't ignore the fact that right-leaning parties allied with Bolsonaro control the parliament with 99 seats and the Senate with 13 seats. This strengthens his conservative movement even if he does not win."

In his victory speech to a mass crowd of supporters, Lula promised to eliminate hunger, slash waiting lists for medical services, and build affordable housing for millions of Brazilians. He said: “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.”

Left sweeps continent

Lula’s victory in the second round of the presidential vote marks a year and a half in which the left has swept to power across the continent, from Honduras to Chile. A map of Latin America today shows left, or left-of-centre, governments in power in all but a handful of countries.

The significance of this change is nowhere more apparent than Colombia, where a 50-year civil war between leftist guerrillas and right-wing paramilitaries and the army, aided and trained by the United States, formally came to an end six years ago. The violence did not end. Activists and former guerrillas were murdered in their hundreds, while some armed groups such as the ELN refused to disarm.

Then in June 2022 a former guerrilla, and later mayor of Bogota, Gustavo Petro, won the presidency. Previous attempts by the left to win democratic elections in the country had been drowned in blood.

In June, Colombia’s Truth Commission produced an exhaustive report on the conflict. Between 1985 and 2018, the worst years of the civil war, 450,664 people were killed, and 121,768 people disappeared, 90 percent of them civilians, a death toll similar to the invasion of Iraq and Syria’s war. The commission’s president, Francisco de Roux, a Jesuit priest, described the accumulated pain as unbearable.

And yet, following a popular uprising in 2021 against the far right government’s austerity policies, a new openness to the left enabled Petro to sweep to victory.

Uncle Sam's shadow

The kind of austerity policies seen in Europe over the past 15 years were pioneered in Latin America in the 1980s and 90s as the continent emerged from dictatorship. One result of these policies was the gradual death of moderate, social democratic politics as ever-rising inequality and poverty opened the way for left populists to achieve political success.

The United States waged a 50-year war against the left on the continent, a policy originating in the 1950s cold war. However, with its wars in the Middle East and focus on central Asia since the 1990s, Latin America gradually prised itself out from underneath Uncle Sam’s shadow. In a mirror of the way Russia lost its former satellite states as they embraced the EU, Nato and capitalism, Washington failed to stem the tide towards the left in Latin America.

The impression may be that the US now accepts that socialism via the ballot box is permissible, or at least can’t be stopped by the CIA campaigns, or coups. Yet this is belied by its support for the destabilisation of left-wing regimes, not just in Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua, but also those elected in the recent pink tide, including Bolivia’s Evo Morales, who was overthrown in 2019, and Pedro Castillo, the union activist turned elected president of Peru, now facing a concerted campaign to remove him from office.

Europe’s doldrums

In the age of social media, political polarisation has infected every continent, but has also turned the political events of seemingly faraway countries like Brazil into important bellwethers for domestic politics in Europe and the US.

Despite flatlining living standards and gaping inequality in the US and Europe, centrist social democracy has made something of a comeback, if one includes Joe Biden’s stuttering presidency, Germany’s Chancellor Olaf Scholz, and centre-left governments in Spain and Portugal. Elsewhere the reconstituted far right has made the most out of the cost of living crisis, making huge gains in France, and helping form new governments in Italy and Sweden.

The sustainability of tinkering at the edges of neoliberalism faces a major test in the US mid-terms, and unlike Brazil’s Lula, American voters have been offered nothing substantial, such as the non-delivered hike in the minimum wage, that might galvanise working-class voters to support the Democrats.

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