British interest in Latin America, and its biggest country, Brazil, has been disgracefully fitful. It woke up when Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva narrowly beat Jair Bolsonaro, the disastrous tree-felling extreme rightist, last October. It even caused the BBC to lead its morning news bulletin in January, when a mob inspired by Bolsonaro and the example of the Capitol riot in the US two years ago attempted to take over the centre of Brasília.
But what is really going on in this vast country of 203 million people? How was it that Bolsonaro, an obscure congressman who had dedicated a vote to impeach President Dilma Rousseff, Lula’s leftist successor, and was a frank admirer of the dictatorship that Lula and Rousseff had struggled to overthrow, ever got elected as president in 2018?
These questions get some early answers in a new book, Brazil After Bolsonaro: The Comeback of Lula da Silva, which I edited, and launched online this week. Written by 15 authors, mostly Brazilian, the chapters range from the history of Lula’s Workers’ party, the PT, to the precarious situation in Amazonia; from black mobilisation, social policy, crime and human rights to foreign policy, one on Brazil in Latin America, and one on Brazil in the world, where Lula made a notable splash in his presidency from 2002 to 2010.
These authors do not share the same views, but together provide a rounded picture of the lead-up to an enormous change of direction for Brazil. This is symbolised by the fact that the United Nations climate conference Cop30 will take place in the Amazon, where there is already a reduction in the rate of deforestation.
However, as Oswaldo Amaral, director of the University of Campinas public opinion research centre, points out, if last year’s election had taken place only six months later, Bolsonaro could have won. He had been buying votes strenuously and painting Lula as a convict. Lula had spent time in prison in the fallout from the huge “car wash” corruption scandal, which had overwhelmed the political system after 2014. More so than elsewhere, this system has always depended on kickbacks, which hit an increasingly unpopular workers’ party particularly hard in those years.
Supporters of Bolsonaro did well in other elections last year, and Lula would not have achieved his presidential win without overwhelming support in the north-east, from where he migrated as a poor child, and in the city of São Paulo, where he made his name as a labour leader in the 70s and 80s.
Marcus Melo and André Regis, political scientists from the Federal University of Pernambuco, point out that congress and the justice system have become much more powerful since democratisation in 1988 and Lula has had to deploy his huge talent for schmoozing since his return this year.
The world and Lula have changed vastly over the past 20 years. In 2009, Barack Obama described him as the most popular politician on the planet for lifting millions of people out of poverty, and Hugo Chávez nicknamed him “sheikh Lula” after big deepwater oil discoveries, which may provide a conflicted background to next year’s Brazilian Cop.
Thomas Traumann, who writes an English-language blog from Rio de Janeiro, points out that Lula, who will be 78 on 27 October, is not just older, but a bit different. He has married Janja, a sociologist who is 21 years younger, after the death of his first wife, who had supported him through all his early struggles.
Janja’s influence is criticised in Brazil, but she represents a different generation, more like Gabriel Boric, the one-time student leader who is now president of Chile. Traumann sees Lula fighting for vindication in a calcified society, where Lulistas and Bolsonaristas are bitterly opposed.
While Brazilians worry about the (now gently recovering) economy, gun crime and the effort to undo regressive social policies, outsiders worry more about Brazil’s foreign policy. Lula is travelling as much as before, putting effort into south-south cooperation through the G20, the now expanded Brics and Ibsa, the India-Brazil-South Africa collaboration; he is re-energising his African initiatives, and supporting a bigger role for Africa on the world stage.
But he has come under western fire for refusing to commit to Ukraine after the Russian invasion. The reasons are opaque, but may have to do with relations with China, attitudes in the PT’s ideological base, and Brazil’s pacifist traditions, which have led it to support a non-nuclear Latin America.
Hopefully, Britain will not forget about Brazil. While the Latin America studies centres, set up in the 1960s, died off one by one, as did Oxford’s excellent Brazil Centre, there are scholars and journalists who remain active and interested. The Penguin editorial director who told me some time around 2006 that “no one on the editorial floor has even heard of Lula” must now be retired.
Richard Bourne is a senior fellow of the Institute for Commonwealth Studies and the author of Lula of Brazil: The Story So Far
