Lula in podium mode bothers allies, diplomats and the US – 03/22/2023 – Politics

The verbiage of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT), who did not leave the so-called platform mode after winning the election last October, has left the field of political folklore and started to worry allies and members of the government.

The most recent episode took place on Tuesday (21), when in an interview with the leftist website Brasil 247, the PT said that Operation Lava Jato was orchestrated in conjunction with the US Department of Justice to destroy Brazilian contractors.

“I am aware that Lava Jato was part of a partnership between the Brazilian Public Ministry, the Brazilian Federal Police and the American Justice, the Department of Justice”, he said, confusing the Judiciary and the body equivalent to the Ministry of Justice in the USA. .

He had already made such an inference without evidence before, which he even tried to raise in Brazilian Justice, with the same argument presented on Tuesday. “It was meant to be destroyed. Because Brazilian civil construction companies were occupying space all over the world,” he said.

Lula disregards that Petrobras alone received almost BRL 7 billion in leniency agreements, repatriation and collaboration from contractors and other firms involved with corruption investigated by Lava Jato.

Initiated in 2014, the action dismantled organized politics in Brazil, leveling the ground for Bolsonaro’s rise. She who fell into disrepute due to abuses, such as those of her symbol judge, Sergio Moro, former minister of the previous government and now senator for União Brasil do Paraná.

It’s one thing, say Brazilian and American diplomats interviewed, is to make an accusation of a friendly government’s involvement in such an action while one is out of power. Another, with consequences, is to do it sitting in the president’s chair.

To cloud the scenario, there is the fact that Lula will travel on Friday (24) to China, a mission that is being viewed with extreme caution by the US State Department. Since the election campaign, when they talked about the Brazilian scenario in a reserved way about Lula, Washington diplomats focused their questions about the PT’s position on the US geopolitical rival in Cold War 2.0.

The Joe Biden government, hostile to Jair Bolsonaro (PL), made unprecedented gestures of support for the electoral system placed in doubt by the then Brazilian president, which helped to cool the spirits of sectors with ambitions of institutional rupture, who dreamed of repeating the Washington’s support seen in the 1964 military coup.

Lula had started with a smart tactical move, going to Biden in a somewhat improvised way for a conversation before the official visit to China. There, they focused on what is a common agenda: environment and democracy. Lula’s plan to broker peace in Ukraine, which leader Xi Jinping will certainly praise in Beijing for showing impartiality despite its alliance with Russia, was largely ignored.

At Itamaraty, the search for an independent policy is tradition, but Brazilian positions have been balanced to demonstrate equidistance. What concerns diplomats, however, is the anti-American animosity exuded by Lula, which goes back to the traditional discourse of the Brazilian left.

Today, there are already comments among Americans that Lula is being unfair to Biden, who worked for a peaceful transition of power in Brazil. They recall that, if China is Brazil’s biggest trading partner, a position it reached in the Lula-2 government in 2009, the US continues to be second, not to mention the cultural connection inherent to the fact that both are Western countries.

On the domestic front, important allies of the president consider that he needs to moderate his tone. The president of a vital party in his arc of government claims that he could be less emphatic in his campaign against the independent Central Bank, for example, but he understands that for the Planalto it is good to have a scapegoat while the government suffers to unleash its legislative agenda.

The same is said, with less conviction of usefulness, about the criticisms of the privatization of Eletrobras. This politician claims that even Lula is aware of the political unfeasibility of reversing the sale, even due to lack of support in Congress, and that he is wrong to speak to his base on the left.

As long as Bolsonaro provides the raw material, as in the case of the coup acts of January 8 or the episode of jewelry in Saudi Arabia, says the ally, that’s fine. The problem is the insistence on gestures to the minority wing of its supporters with items that displease most of them.

A petista close to the president considers that none of that will change, given that Lula is, according to him, “with blood in his eyes as if it were his last term”. But he also points out conciliatory gestures: the PT is taking with him to China a very representative entourage of sectors that were associated with Bolsonarism in agribusiness, for example.

The biggest problem, says this ally, is the style. In the same interview with 247, the PT recalled that, when he was arrested, he said that “everything will only be fine when I fuck this Moro”, in reference to the former judge who sentenced him to jail.

It was not the first public curse word used by Lula in his political career, far from it, as the “FDP” used to describe then-president Itamar Franco in 1993 recalls. The use of the resource in speeches, something that had already happened in his first governments, became common in Bolsonaro’s government.