Lula of Brazil: The Story So Far

10. Lula So Far: An Interim Assessment

When Lula was reelected for a second term, on 29 October 2006, around four thousand of his supporters partied that evening on the Avenida Paulista in São Paulo. But the turnout was tiny compared with the celebration four years earlier, when one hundred thousand people came out into the street, filling the long commercial thoroughfare. Looking at it through British eyes, one could not help but compare this diminished enthusiasm with the gradual loss of excitement at the successive election victories won by Tony Blair and his “new” Labour Party. Is this the inevitable fate of a government of the left, which aspires to improve the lot of the mass of the population, when faced with the compromises, complexities, and disappointments of the modern world? Could Lula have done differently, or better? Any assessment of this Brazilian president, who is arguably the most significant since Getúlio Vargas, can only be interim. Second terms, for both Latin American and North American presidents, can be very different from their first. In Latin America, reformist leaders often become more conservative. By definition, there is a time limit to their authority, and would-be successors start jostling to inherit. In the Brazilian case, it was not clear that the PT would be able to field a strong candidate in 2010, and the government forces might support someone like Ciro Gomes, of the PSB, a former minister for Lula, who was elected with proportionately the largest majority in the country as federal deputy for 209 10 LU LA S O FAR AN INTERIM ASSESSMENT the northeastern state of Ceará.1 On the opposition side there could be a struggle between two PSDB governors, José Serra and Aécio Neves. But 2006 marked the renaissance of Lula, after the depth of his unpopularity during the mensalão crisis of 2005. In reality, had he dropped dead at any point in the previous decade,2 his obituarists would rightly have pointed to his prominent roles in ending the dictatorship, building freer trade unions, establishing a large-scale party for workers and the left, and consolidating democracy. None of these things had he done on his own, but his career was a thread running through modern Brazilian history and, most would say, for the better. He had two driving motivations. One was to end the worst poverty in Brazil. The second was to respect and reward the contribution of Brazilian workers. In a way, everything he did could be related to these simple but powerful concerns. At his inauguration in January 2003, he said that he did not want any Brazilian to go to bed hungry. The BolsaFam ília, hikes in the salário mínimo, and the other social programs were designed to transfer income and opportunities to the poorest Brazilians. Their votes in 2006 showed that they recognized that he was doing this; statisticians could prove it.3 His repeated phrase that nothing could hold back a Brazilian worker, and his personal identification with the “peasantry” of the industrial areas around São Paulo, had driven his participation in the strikes of the 1970s and his work to create the PT. The compression of wages in the “miracle” years was a source of anger and resolve. The day after his last rally before the first-round vote in 2006, he stood outside auto factories in São Bernardo, leafleting and talking with workers; it was as though he needed to reconnect with his own roots. Ricardo Kotscho, the journalist who became his press secretary, understood this identification well. Writing of him at an earlier stage in his political career, he described how he always went home to São Bernardo between campaign journeys: Lula was his own hero; he had no idols or models. The saga of the Silva brothers, who left as little ones from the miserable depths of Pernambuco in a truck with benches (pau-de-arara) and suffered a lot until finding work in the factories of São Bernardo, he had told me in 210 l u l a o f b r a z i l verse and prose a thousand or more times. But what impressed me more was his relationship to those he called the “peasantry” (peãozada), the multitude of metalworkers who created a species of independent republic in the ABC.4 Lula was an instinctive rather than an...