It will be his first official trip since his re-election. Brazil’s new president, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, announced on Thursday that he will travel to COP27 in Egypt on Monday. “I will have more discussions with world leaders in a single day than Bolsonaro in four years,” Lula attacked during a speech to deputies in Brasilia.
After COP27, Lula is due to travel to Portugal on November 18, where he will be received by President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa and Prime Minister Antonio Costa, according to the Brazilian press, which quotes Portuguese diplomatic sources.
Winner of Jair Bolsonaro by a short margin on October 30, Lula will begin his third term on January 1, after having governed the country from 2003 to 2010. “We are going to put Brazil back at the center of geopolitics”, he said. insisted, recognizing the “expectations” of the international community with regard to the preservation of the Amazon rainforest.
In the first three years of far-right President Jair Bolsonaro’s term in office, average annual deforestation in the Amazon has increased by 75% compared to the previous decade. Lula pledged to do everything to achieve a level of “zero deforestation” and to restore the environmental control bodies that suffered severe budget and personnel cuts under the Bolsonaro government.
Bolsonaro has “a debt to the people”, says Lula
During his speech on Thursday, Lula also said that Jair Bolsonaro had “a debt to the Brazilian people” and that he should “ask forgiveness for the lies he told during the election and for his attacks on the ballot boxes electronics”. The far-right president had multiplied criticism of the electoral system before the election, denouncing “fraud” without providing proof. Bolsonarist activists have been camping since his defeat in front of barracks to demand military intervention to prevent Lula from gaining power.
On Wednesday evening, the Ministry of Defense presented a report from the Army showing that “no inconsistency” had been noted in the result from the electronic ballot boxes. This 65-page report, however, claims that it was impossible to completely rule out the risk of fraud from this voting system, although no irregularities have been found since it came into force in 1996.