Wild antiviralism: Lula threatens the low-hanging fruit in foreign policy – 02/25/2024 – Marcus Melo

This is neither the first nor the second time that President Lula has made outrageous mistakes and made bizarre comparisons. In 2009, when Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was re-elected, in a context in which dozens of candidates were prevented from running and the abuse of power triggered protests in that country and abroad, Lula stated that it was not “the first time that an opposition party that He loses and complains a lot.” And he compared the Iranian theocracy with the USA: “we can never forget President Bush’s first election. People accepted the results despite their doubts.”

At the time, the editorial board of a British magazine of which I was a member had released a protest in the scientific community denouncing the arrest and torture of one of our colleagues, an Iranian academic. Lula’s statements caused perplexity.

Successive fiascos have a pattern. They reflect a search for protagonism that is inappropriate with the country’s status, a regional power, as Maria Hermínia Tavares pointed out. Anti-Americanism plays an essential role in achieving leadership in the Global South. Historically, it has also served another purpose: an apparently costless way of asserting a left-wing identity (which has implied support for authoritarian regimes); and to mitigate costs with its alliance base with ultra-conservative sectors at the domestic level. But the costs are growing for a government that seeks to assert itself as part of a front for democracy.

The links between foreign and domestic policies are a classic theme in political science. As I have already pointed out here in the column, the strategic choice with Lula 3 is to delegate powers at the level of domestic politics and focus on foreign policy where “the low-hanging fruit lies”. Yes, it is at the international level that the country has important comparative advantages due to the country’s place in global climate change policy. But the successive fiascos did not occur in this arena, but in the so-called big politics, of the great world conflicts. The politics of climate change and global politics are now closely linked: fiascos in the latter affect the former.

The fruits are difficult to reap at the domestic level: this week the government suffered a crucial defeat with the MP’s withdrawal from tax relief. The government had doubled down by confronting Congress with an MP, after having its veto overturned, as I showed here. On the external front, instead of practicing prudent pragmatism at the strategic and economic level, combined with a focus on environmental issues, Lula mobilizes a kind of wild anti-viralism.

Lula’s strategic priority in this mandate of making history as a first-class statesman is at risk of falling flat.

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