Lula’s trip to Portugal, scheduled for Thursday night, has been followed with relative attention in Brazil.
What is at stake, above all, is the supposed coldness of the Brazilian president on the part of the Portuguese right, a subject much discussed in the newspapers.
And this “tight skirt”, to use a local expression that means “embarrassment”, was provoked by recent statements by Lula critical of the actions of the United States and also of the European Union in the conflict in Ukraine.
Observers believe that, once in European territory, the Brazilian president will correct his trajectory and use more sympathetic words with Brussels and, by extension, with Lisbon.
At the same time, Lula’s close relationship with the Portuguese heads of state and government has been highlighted, unlike his predecessor Jair Bolsonaro, whose cancellation of a lunch with Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa last July is still highly remembered. The reason for this cancellation, although it had not been made official, was precisely a meeting between Lula and Marcelo in São Paulo, on the eve of the meeting in Brasilia with the then president.
From a strategic point of view, specialists see Portugal as a friendly gateway for Brazil into Europe, a market that the Lula government wants to strengthen by restoring the Mercosur-European Union agreements. In this case, the visit to Lisbon is conceived as the third vertex of a trip that began in the United States and continued in China.
Lula, however, suffers internal political tribulations, which may affect the interest of Brazilian journalists who follow him. On Wednesday, he lost a minister, General Gonçalves Dias, from the Office of Institutional Relations, because videos of him in the invasions of Brasilia on January 8 were released, apparently failing to defend the Planalto, one of the duties of that ministry.
Source: TSF
