Why Lula has failed to regain the leadership and influence he had in Latin America during his first term

As soon as he returned to the presidency of Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva signaled his intention to resume the kind of leadership with which he shone in Latin America when he first held the post two decades ago.

“I am back to make good agreements with Argentina,” Lula said a few days after taking office in January 2023 during a visit to Buenos Aires, where he even talked about creating a common currency for bilateral trade.

It was no coincidence that Lula chose this destination to begin the intense list of international travels of his third presidential term.

In addition to being an important partner of Brazil, Argentina at the time also hosted a summit of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), which Lula helped set up in 2010 and which was organized ten years later by his predecessor and arch-rival, the far-right Jair, was organized. Bolsonaro, abandoned.

Lula then announced that the Brazilian development bank BNDES would once again support infrastructure works in the region, an important instrument of the influence he had in Latin America when he ruled between 2003 and 2010, and protagonist of several subsequent corruption scandals.

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“The BNDES will once again finance Brazil’s trade relations and will once again finance technical projects to help Brazilian companies abroad and help neighboring countries grow,” Lula said.

But a year later, there are doubts whether this will happen. In Argentina Javier Milei took over the government, a harsh critic of Lula, who is closer to Bolsonaro, and those Brazilian promises became an example of the problems he still has to tackle in his own region today.

“The world is more complex now, so what (Lula) achieved with relative ease in the 2000s costs him a lot more. And if we only think about the region, it has a lot of difficulty,” says Paulo Velasco, professor of international politics at the State University of Rio de Janeiro (UERJ), in dialogue with BBC Mundo.

“Deprecated”

Born into poverty 78 years ago, Lula was the first former worker to reach the top ranks of Brazilian power, wherever he ended up symbol of the democratic and effective left in Latin America.

During his first two consecutive terms, Brazil grew economically and millions of people have escaped poverty thanks to state aid programs, amid a bonanza driven by high commodity prices.

In the region, Lula not only reached several cooperation agreements and promoted the great expansion of Brazilian companies in the field of infrastructure works, but also achieved a clear political ascendancy in the void left by Washington.

This went beyond the natural weight that Brazil has as the largest Latin American economy.

Many saw Lula as an alternative reference to the more radical left, represented by the then Venezuelan president. Hugo Chavezin the ‘Bolivarian’ countries, although both were allies and embraced projects such as Celac during a regional wave of left-wing governments.

By the end of his second term, with high popularity ratings, Lula was a global star in Latin American politics and Brazil was seen as the country with the greatest leadership in the region according to a 2011 Latinobarómetro survey.

For all these reasons, when the leader of the Workers’ Party (PT) returned to the presidency a year ago and began winking at neighboring countries, he seemed on course to resume his regional agenda and status.

However, experts warn that the current panorama is very different from what Lula had during his first governments.

“It is practically impossible to implement the agenda of Lula’s first or second term today,” said Marcelo Coutinho, professor of international politics at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ).

“The Brazilian foreign policy agenda is clearly outdated,” Coutinho told BBC Mundo.

“The New Left”

In his first year as president, Lula has even received questions about his views from left-wing Latin American leaders.

At an Amazon summit held in Belém do Pará in August, Colombian President Gustavo Petro criticized the left’s “denialism” when speaking about the energy transition, a term used by host Lula in his speech.

“There is a huge ethical conflict coming, especially for progressive forces, which should be related to science,” Petro said, referring to climate change.

While both have slowed deforestation in their countries, Petro is trying to give up fossil fuel extraction, while Lula has talked about studying eventual crude oil exploration at the mouth of the Amazon and Brazil joining as an observer in the OPEC+ made possible. brings together oil producing countries.

In May, when Venezuela was reintroduced at a regional summit in Brasilia, Lula stated that a “narrative” has been created about the lack of democracy in that country, something that prompted a response from Chilean President Gabriel Boric.

The problem of human rights in Venezuela “is not a narrative construction, it is a reality, it is serious”Boric, who belongs to a more recent left-wing generation than Lula, then said.

Luis Lacalle Pou, the president who heads a center-right ruling coalition in Uruguay, also criticized Lula for his comments on Venezuela.

That summit was convened by Lula to relaunch South American integration plans beyond ‘ideological differences’, but so far no concrete progress has been made.

Velasco points out that these controversies showed that “the PT itself is having difficulty getting used to what is the new left in Latin America.”

But he expects Argentina’s libertarian Milei government to be “the main challenge (Lula) will have in the coming years, because they agree on very few issues.”

“Brazil did everything it could to get Argentina into the BRICS group (which also includes Russia, India, China and South Africa) and in the end Milei chose not to join,” he points out. “The situation in Mercosur is not easy at all and Lacalle Pou’s government insists that it can only negotiate an agreement with China.”

As interim president of Mercosur last term, Lula tried to sign the delayed free trade deal between the bloc and the European Union, but disagreements again prevented negotiations from concluding.

And analysts like Coutinho believe that Brazil has neglected South American integration to prioritize the BRICS as a geopolitical bloc where they can gain global weight, even if this weakens their ties with the West.

“What’s left?”

On the domestic front, the Brazilian president has also had to deal with difficulties that did not exist in his first administration.

Lula and his PT are suffering from the wear and tear of corruption scandals – including a 2018 conviction against himself that was later annulled – and the hostility of Bolsonaro and his followers, thousands of whom forcibly invaded Brasilia a year ago in search of a coup. army.

Without a solid majority in Congress, Lula’s government in November introduced a bill for the BNDES to once again finance works and services of his country’s companies abroad, as promised in Buenos Aires.

That bank’s loans for Brazilian companies’ infrastructure projects in Latin America and the Caribbean grew by more than 1,000% between 2001 and 2010, becoming a lever for Lula’s regional leadership.

But the payouts were suspended in 2016, in the middle of the Lava Jato operation investigating corruption practices by the construction companies that obtained these loans.

Lula’s government tried to provide new guarantees in its bill.

For example, he proposed banning credits to Brazil’s debtor countries such as Cuba and Venezuela, where the BNDES supported Odebrecht projects worth millions of dollars: from a metro line in Caracas to the expansion of the port of Mariel.

However, the proposal could run afoul of a current of members of Congress seeking something very different: a constitutional amendment to allow these appropriations to be approved or rejected by the Legislature, which would make them much more cumbersome.

Lula enjoys great respect inside and outside Brazil for putting the South American giant back on the routine path of democracy.

But in Latin America it still is The successes of the past have yet to be achieved.

“Unfortunately, the first year of government, which was of fundamental importance, is already over, and what remains?” Coutinho reflects. “There was nothing.” (JO)