Lula da Silva was sworn in as President of Brazil on the morning of January 1 in Praça dos Três Poderes exactly six months ago, but a week later, at about the same time and in the same place, the government was rocked by an invasion of opposition radicals . In the semester, the president resumed historic social inclusion programs, but his relationship with Congress is suffering. He’s betting heavily on foreign policy, but has lost some of his bids. It picks positive indicators in the economy, but it is there that it identifies its main enemy, the Central Bank president. That is, for every progress there is a “but”.
Unsurprisingly, Lula praises the semester. “I am very pleased,” he told EBC. But even he uses the “but”: “But rebuilding is much more difficult than doing something new, now, from July 2, we are launching a great program of works and national development”.
The opposition, unsurprisingly, criticizes. “In the first six months, Lula’s misgovernment has been deformed, not reformed,” said Carlos Jordy, parliamentary leader of the opposition bloc in the Chamber of Deputies.
For the PL’s deputy, Bolsonaro’s party, “the government is revengeful in attacking the Central Bank’s autonomy and only approves its measures on the basis of buying votes in new monthly allowances”. “In addition, Lula is more interested in traveling and meeting the leaders of countries that do not bring Brazil any good, such as Argentina or Venezuela.”
born under blackmail
For experts, such as André Kaysel, professor of political science at the University of Campinas, “the government was born under blackmail” with the January 8 attacks “given birth in Bolsonarist camps in front of the barracks supported by the armed forces”.
“However, the government’s greatest achievement has been to gradually place programs in health, hunger relief, human rights, environment and foreign policy following the dismantling of the public administration of the previous government,” continues, speaking to the DN.
“For now, the main problem of the government, with an original alliance of 130 of the 513 parliamentarians, is its relationship with Congress,” Kaysel continues, “because Bolsonarianism is of a similar size and the Centrão, essentially a right wing interested is in making immediate gains. political and financial influences that were greatly amplified in the weak Bolsonaro government when it took over the budget predominates”.
“In this way, the old practice of ‘Brazil coalition presidentialism’, i.e. control of Congress by the executive through the distribution of ministries among parties, no longer works by itself.”
For Kaysel, “another front of pressure is the Central Bank, which became autonomous from the executive in the Bolsonaro government, as the economic elites demanded, and whose president is the Bolsonarist Roberto Campos Neto, grandson of a famous dictatorship minister but without half of the grandfather’s intellectual genius, which keeps the interest rate at 13.75%, very high by international standards,” he concludes.
Chicken flees?
“But Standard & Poor’s indicator towards a recovery in Brazil’s investment rate can be read as a signal to the market and to the central bank,” said Leonardo Trevisan, a professor of economics at the Superior School of Advertising and Marketing .
For Trevisan, in economic discipline, the government deserves a 14: “Lula and Finance Minister Fernando Haddad, whose acceptance in the market is the most important factor in these six months, would perhaps give a 7 [no Brasil a escala é até 10]especially since you’ve restored expectations”.
“There are positive signs, such as growth in formal employment, the highest in four years, especially in sectors related to the digital world, and with regard to agribusiness, where the government has responded to requests for preferential interest rates for a total of 24 billion euros. real”.
“But everyone, like me, with the whitest hair, is always behind with these improvements that we call ‘chicken flight’ in Brazil,” Trevisan told DN. “In the second semester, the approval of the tax reform by Congress is essential, without this approval, the improvements will not cease to be the so-called ‘chicken flight’,” he concludes.
Foreign policy
In another context, with one of these six months spent outside Brazil [ver números], there is no doubt that foreign policy has been Lula’s priority. For Vinícius Vieira, Professor of International Relations at Fundação Armando Álvares Penteado: “Lula wanted to embrace the whole world, including the issue of the war in Ukraine, but he only got the right tone in the last few days, after a speech in Paris placing Brazil as the representative of the countries that are poor in combating the Global North’s view of pollution”.
“In addition to the Ukrainian issue that only cost Brazil time, Lula was mistaken in thinking that, without military weight, the country can still have the influence of China and India and has not gained a major advantage in the process of developing an alternative for China as a manufacturing destination in the West,” he continues.
“But Lula, despite his mistakes, knows how to practice diplomacy, unlike Bolsonaro,” says Vieira, “and the effort to help Argentina’s economy is beneficial because a large part of Brazil’s exports still depend on its neighbor through Mercosur”. “In the second half? It is likely that during the BRICS meeting in South Africa, Lula will push for the creation of an alternative commercial currency to the dollar”.
Source: DN
