2024-01-19 01:08:14
The internal agenda and trips around Brazil will be the priority of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, 78, in this second year of his mandate after, during the first, he multiplied his visits abroad, which has meant the return with strength of Brazil to the international arena. This Thursday, Lula began a two-day trip to Bahia, Pernambuco and Ceará, in the northeast, the region where the Workers’ Party obtains the best electoral results. “With this trip I want to announce that I am traveling through Brazil again,” he said. With an eye on the municipal elections next October, the president has announced works, investments and will preside over inaugurations to strengthen his electoral base and regain strength after the disaster suffered by the PT in the previous municipal elections.
The president and leader of the Brazilian left, who last week commemorated the first anniversary of the failed uprising with the boycott of Bolsonarism and its allies, added: “I found a country devastated by a plague of locusts, a consequence of the last Government . Public policies have been dismantled. “It has been almost seven years since school feeding has been expanded, for example.”
Last year, Lula visited 24 countries, including the United States, China, Argentina and several in Europe and Africa. She spent more than two months outside Brazil in addition to being on medical leave for several weeks after having a hip replacement implanted. In 2024, the plans are to also travel a lot, but at home, as he himself emphasized before the end of the year. “I traveled abroad a lot in 2023. But whoever misses Lulinha should get ready because in 2024 Janja [su esposa] and I are going to travel through this country. “I’m going to make a lot of trips here because the country needs encouragement and motivation.”
Municipal elections loom on the horizon and the PT has absolute urgency to improve the result of 2020, when it did not conquer any state capital and was left with less municipal power than ever in its four decades of history. Two years later, Lula set out to save Bolsonaro’s democracy and managed to gather a wide range of acronyms to win the presidential election.
The challenge is important because, although it is still the most solid and well-established party in Brazil, it now governs in a coalition. Lula’s Cabinet includes representatives of more than a dozen parties that will contest the municipal elections separately. And furthermore, the Centrão, a constellation of center-right acronyms that dominates Congress and is the true balance of the balance in Brazilian politics, continues to lean towards the far-right movement led by former president Jair Bolsonaro. Lula, in any case, woos the heads of the Centrão (the great center) with positions and subsidies for his fiefdoms. But every now and then they give him a scare. This Thursday, parliamentarians from the evangelical lobby (one in six) protested against Lula for annulling a tax exemption they enjoyed.
Although this first trip of 2024 is to one of the most impoverished regions of Brazil, it will not be focused on the social or security agenda, but rather on announcing new public investments for industry and the military within the Government’s star plan to boost the economy. with 350,000 million dollars. In Pernambuco, the state where she was born and lived until at the age of seven she emigrated with her mother and her siblings to São Paulo, Lula has visited the most modern refinery of the oil company Petrobras and announced that the works are resuming. The refinery in question became a symbol of the diversion of public funds and the corruption pursued by the Lava Jato investigation, in which Lula was convicted and imprisoned for sentences that were later annulled.
In his speech, the president has reiterated an old accusation that has never been proven, that that court case was the work of “some judges and prosecutors in this country subordinate to the US Department of Justice because the US does not want us to have a company like Petrobras,” the crown jewel of the Brazilian economy.
Winks to the military establishment
Several of the other planned events involve clear nods to the military establishment, with which the leftist president has an especially delicate relationship after the attempted coup d’état in which the Bolsonaro years culminated. In Salvador de Bahía he will inaugurate an aerospace research technology park, designed by the Ministry of Defense. And in Recife (Ceará), he will preside over the replacement of a military chief in addition to giving the first push to a new sergeants academy. Already in his first two terms (2003-2010), Lula tried to soften the military’s misgivings towards him and the PT with investments in the Armed Forces.
The good and unexpected performance of the economy gives oxygen to Lula. The GDP is expected to close 2023 with a growth of around 3%, triple what was expected when the mandate began 12 months earlier, and to some extent counteracts the difficulties it faces due to not having a parliamentary majority. His popularity has decreased, but it is still around 40%.
In the coming weeks, the president plans to travel to more complicated territory, more hostile due to polarization, to Minas Gerais and Santa Catarina, two states governed by allies of Bolsonaro. In the first, Lula won the presidential election by tenths; In the second, his far-right rival swept 70%.
In foreign policy, the Government of Brazil is focused on the presidency of the G20, which it holds until the end of the year. Among the objectives, some are long-standing, such as reforming global governance so that it better reflects current power balances. Others, however, are new, such as the project to illuminate international financing instruments for the fight against the climate emergency or social programs.
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