In his try to win one other term as president of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro repeatedly attacked the country’s election system, particularly the usage of electronic ballot boxes. He spread misinformation and incited quite a few acts of political violence. But despite his efforts to call the legitimacy of the election into query, certainly one of his predecessors, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, narrowly won the second round of Brazil’s presidential election on Oct. 30 and can return to office on Jan. 1 for his third term.
Mr. Lula was born in the town of Caetés within the northeastern state of Pernambuco. He won 60.3 million votes on this 12 months’s run-off election—essentially the most in Brazil’s history. His victory was possible because ideological opponents got here together to defeat a robust far-right populist party, achieving a victory for human rights and social justice.
Luiz Lula: “I’ll govern for all Brazilians, and never only for many who voted for me. There will not be two Brazils. We’re one country, one people, one great nation.”
Priorities for Mr. Lula as he becomes president include addressing the food insecurity that affects greater than half of the Brazilian population, in addition to the restoration of the economy and democratic normalcy after Mr. Bolonaro’s populist rule. His victory speech recalled the feelings President Joseph R. Biden Jr. conveyed when he won the 2020 U.S. election.
“I’ll govern for all Brazilians, and never only for many who voted for me,” Mr. Lula said. “There will not be two Brazils. We’re one country, one people, one great nation.”
Though Mr. Bolsonaro lost, his extremist ideology persists. Steve Bannon, repeating the role he played in the USA in 2016 when he was a political strategist for Donald J. Trump, helped to construct support for the acute right in Brazil, and Mr. Trump himself made a video that posted to Mr. Bolsonaro’s official Twitter account a day before the Oct. 30 election.
Mr. Trump told Brazilians, “Get out and vote for President Bolsonaro, he’s doing the job like few people could!” and “You may have a likelihood to elect certainly one of the nice people in all of politics.”
The 2 conservative populist leaders have strikingly similar styles, each incorporating expressions of authoritarianism and statements that may very well be called sexist, racist and homophobic. Mr. Bolsonaro has solid doubt on the legitimacy of Mr. Biden’s victory in 2020, and a few of Mr. Trump’s supporters have in turn alleged that Mr. Lula’s election was fraudulent. Mr. Bannon told a Brazilian news outlet, “We want a ballot-by-ballot audit, even when it takes six months. Within the meantime, the president mustn’t conform to leave.”
Priorities for Mr. Lula include addressing food insecurity, in addition to the restoration of the economy and democratic normalcy after Mr. Bolonaro’s populist rule.
Within the aftermath of Mr. Bolsonaro’s defeat, a few of his supporters attempted to shut down highways across the country, but thus far police have acted quickly to release the roads. These and other isolated protests have failed to stop a transition of power. Mr. Lula’s victory was swiftly confirmed by Brazil’s Supreme Electoral Court, in addition to national and state political leaders, and the immediate recognition of his win by world leaders, including President Biden, reduced the capability for response from the acute right. “China attaches great importance to the event of China-Brazil relations and is able to work with Lula,” announced Xi Jinping, president of China, Brazil’s largest trading partner.
President-elect Lula was supported by nine political parties in his election in an alliance to defeat the populist far right. His victory could mean a resumption of civil dialogue, but his first task is to hunt allies inside the legislature to stabilize democracy and discourage right-wing extremism.
The vast majority of the House of Representatives and the Senate are center-right, and Mr. Bolsonaro’s Liberal Party is still the most important bloc in Congress. Mr. Lula’s political base is lower-income voters, and he might want to construct support among the many middle class for his initiatives. But he has an ideal deal of political skill and experience working across parties.
To fight political violence, Mr. Lula must reconstruct the country’s legal framework. The 2022 election was marked by several assassinations, assaults on journalists and reports of the harassment and intimidation of voters. The Observatory of Political and Electoral Violence in Brazil, on the Federal University of the State of Rio de Janeiro, tallied 212 cases of political violence between July and September 2022. Members of Mr. Lula’s Employees’ Party were essentially the most frequent victims of violence.
The human rights organizations Justiça Global and Terra de Direitos also recorded 247 instances of political violence—400 percent higher than the number recorded in 2018. Seventy percent of Brazilians fear being assaulted due to their political beliefs, in response to the electoral research agency Datafolha.
Mr. Lula’s first task is to hunt allies inside the legislature to stabilize democracy and discourage right-wing extremism.
But since a powerful economy is the muse of a stable democratic order, recovering economic growth must also be a primary task. Mr. Lula must restore policies that combat hunger and destitution and that generate social inclusion, a model of economic and civil development model he managed during previous administrations.
Lula’s opportunities for working with the church
Through the campaign, Mr. Lula was literally demonized by Pentecostal and other evangelical Protestant supporters of Mr. Bolsonaro, a few of whom spread rumors on social media that Mr. Lula would close Christian churches as president. The truth is, he has promised to keep up freedom of worship and said that his government would encourage partnerships with churches in providing social services for Brazilians.
Some Catholic supporters of Mr. Bolsonaro have also attacked the Brazilian bishops, who’ve been especially critical of the president’s handling of the Covid pandemic, and one state legislator allied with Mr. Bolsonaro made news in 2020 by calling Pope Francis a “bum.” Each Mr. Bolsonaro and Mr. Lula are Catholic.
The Catholic Church has no party, however it does have a side—the side of essentially the most impoverished, of social justice and of democracy. The presence of the church in the general public square is inspired by its social doctrine in communion with Pope Francis. Its relationship with the state is characterised by cooperation in defense of human dignity and the common good.
Pope Francis’ exhortation “Evangelii Gaudium,” states that the church “cannot and must not remain on the sidelines within the fight for justice” (No. 183), quoting the 2005 encyclical “Deus Caritas Est” by Pope Benedict XVI. Some bishops took this message to heart and appeared to openly oppose Mr. Bolsonaro in the course of the campaign.
Mr. Lula also plans to create a ministry of Indigenous peoples, a response to growing violence against Brazil’s greater than 300 Indigenous communities.
Archbishop Odilo Scherer, cardinal archbishop of São Paulo, and Bishop Vicente Ferreira, auxiliary bishop of Belo Horizonte, warned of a fascist threat posed by the acute right. Faced with a split inside the Brazilian church, the hierarchy repudiated the manipulation of religion for political ends and defended the secular nature of the state.
Because there was no room for impartiality, many bishops got here to consider that it was the church’s mission to support her faithful in discerning between two potential outcomes for the country: one democratic and the opposite authoritarian; one committed to the defense of life and dignity for the impoverished, the opposite committed to an economy that discards essentially the most impoverished and degrades the environment.
“Christians can’t be indifferent to hunger and destitution, to the shortage of dignified work, to the shortage of health and education,” said Bishop Jaime Spengler, vice-president of the Brazilian bishops’ conference.
It’s the duty of governments to cut back the gap between the wealthy and the impoverished. Inequality is the structural evil of Brazil, and social inequality is Brazil’s best problem. The 20 richest billionaires within the country have more wealth than 128 million Brazilians—or 60 percent of the population. Unequal societies can turn out to be violent societies.
To attain a just economy, Mr. Lula may have to adopt public policies that seek to cut back the social and economic differences among the many population. It’s urgent to tackle inequalities within the country, be they economic, racial or gender-related. And in response to the federal Structure, it’s the duty of the state to ensure equal social and economic rights, including education, health, work, leisure, security, social security, the protection of moms and youngsters, and assistance to the needy.
In the approaching months, Brazil’s Catholic Church should have the opportunity to search out common cause with the brand new president on matters of social justice.
Mr. Lula can be expected to revive the care of creation as a primary concern of his government. “Brazil and the planet need a living Amazon,” Mr. Lula said in a speech following his win. “It is feasible to generate wealth without destroying the environment.” The president-elect is taken into account an authoritative leader on the problem of the climate emergency, and he has accepted the Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s invitation to attend the World Summit on Climate Change, or COP27.
Due to Mr. Lula’s victory, Norway and Germany are planning to reactivate the Amazon Fund. Aimed toward detecting and fighting environmental crimes, the fund had been suspended in 2019, after Mr. Bolsonaro had unilaterally shut down the independent local commissions that were administering its conservation initiatives. Under Mr. Bolsonaro’s administration, annual deforestation within the Amazon grew by 72 percent. (The Amazonian region extends across nine countries: Brazil, Columbia, Bolivia, Venezuela, Peru, Guyana, Suriname, Ecuador and French Guiana).
Mr. Lula also plans to create a ministry of Indigenous peoples, a response to growing violence against Brazil’s greater than 300 Indigenous communities. “You’re a living memory of the mission that God has entrusted to us all: the protection of our common home,” Pope Francis told the Indigenous peoples of the Amazon during his visit to Chile and Peru in 2018.
In the approaching months, Brazil’s Catholic Church must also have the opportunity to search out common cause with the brand new president on all of those matters of social justice. Only a state truly on the service of the nation is able to guaranteeing rights to all people.
In brief, the church hopes that the politics of the brand new government shall be placed “truly on the service of the common good” (“Fratelli Tutti,” No.154).
