One year of Lula in office: Back on the world stage

One year after taking office, Brazil’s President Lula has achieved national and international success. But his assessments, for example about the war in Ukraine, often offend his Western partners.

“O Brasil está de volta” – Brazil is back – President Lula da Silva repeated again and again last year: Back on the world stage and back in the circle of respected liberal democracies, after the four dark years under his predecessor Jair Bolsonaro, the observer in Seen at home and abroad as right-wing extremist and anti-democratic.

Since Lula took office on January 1, 2023, Brazil has once again become a cosmopolitan country in which democratic institutions are respected and civil rights are protected, says 78-year-old Lula.

Return to prison

The appreciation of a democratic constitutional state is practically written into his biography: During Brazil’s military dictatorship, the metal worker rose to become a union leader and became a co-founder of the Workers’ Party, whose candidate he was ultimately elected president for the first time in 2002.

After leaving office, corruption charges landed him in prison for almost two years. But in 2022 he ran again – cleared of all legal allegations – and defeated the right-wing populist Bolsonaro, albeit extremely narrowly. Not only Brazil, Lula himself is back too.

Rainforest deforestation probably decreased significantly

And he has already achieved a lot: According to government figures, deforestation in the Amazon forest fell by 22 percent in his first year in office. His Environment Minister Marina Silva admitted, however, that some of the deforestation had only been pushed further south.

After all, environmental protection is now a kind of cross-cutting issue for all ministries, and the Ministry of Finance alone has issued sustainable government bonds worth the equivalent of more than two billion euros, which will flow into a climate fund. It helps that Brazil’s economy has enjoyed stable growth for years.

However, Lula’s raw materials policy is in tension with his environmental policy: Brazil produces more than 3.7 million barrels of oil per day. It is the ninth largest producer in the world – and Lula wants to move up to fourth place.

“That makes no sense,” criticizes the former president of the environmental agency IBAMA, Suely Araújo, in view of public tenders for funding areas in the Amazon delta, along the Atlantic coast and in other sensitive regions.

Loyalty over diversity

Lula’s domestic policy also reflects complex interests: more women and blacks are represented in the government than in the last ten years. But many activists in social movements were unhappy with Lula’s nominations to the Supreme Court, as he nominated two white men to the posts.

One had been his personal lawyer, the other one of his former ministers, a long-time ally. Based on his own experiences with the corrupt justice system, Lula would have wanted “absolutely loyal people” in these positions, says political scientist Mauricio Santoro. If only to protect yourself from possible corruption trials or other disputes before the Supreme Court.

Putin, a friend from the past

Lula’s foreign policy also offended some political friends in the West: he judged Israel’s war against Hamas to be “practically a genocide” and also refused to adopt the Western interpretation of Vladimir Putin’s attack on Ukraine.

Political scientist Santoro interprets this as a fundamental misunderstanding of Lula: In many respects, the 78-year-old’s worldview is “still similar to 20 years ago, when he was elected president for the first time and Putin was an important ally of Lula,” for example the founding of the BRICS community of states.

Despite the war and the international arrest warrant, Lula invited the Russian president to the G20 meeting in Rio next year and initially said that he would not have Putin arrested, even though Brazil is a member of the International Criminal Court in The Hague.

Ultimately, however, he backtracked and announced that he would not interfere in judicial matters. Lula and Brazil are back on the world stage, but the world has changed.