Belo Horizonte, Brazil – The first 100 days of government can be like a honeymoon, with voters and politicians hoping for a fresh start. But for Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, despite some signs of progress, the past three months have been marked by a certain fatigue.
In the social arena, his game has been strong, with Lula reinstating programs aimed at strengthening low-income housing, water supply and financial aid for needy families.
And following Brazil’s stark return to the World Food Program’s Hunger Map, with more than 33 million Brazilians going hungry last year, Lula has relaunched the National Council for Food and Nutrition Security, which had been defunct under former President Jair Bolsonaro.
“We can see he wants to do good things for the poor — something the former president didn’t do,” Rosangela de Fatima Silva, who lives in the southeastern city of Diamantina and works in a kitchen serving local housing activists, told Al Jazeera.
Rosângela de Fátima Silva, coordinator of Ocupação Vitória’s Solidary Kitchen, sits outside her home in Diamantina, Brazil (Amanda Magnani/Al Jazeera)
But governing was not an easy task. The nature of Lula’s coalition government raises some internal contradictions, experts say – and without a solid base in parliament, some projects could struggle to get approved.
In addition, the January 8 storming of government buildings by Bolsonaro supporters exposed the apparent hostility towards Lula among some ranks of the country’s security services, resulting in a wave of firings for their perceived inaction.
“Lula 3.0 is different from Lula 1.0 and Lula 2.0,” Evandro Menezes de Carvalho, coordinator of the Center for Brazil-China Studies at the Getulio Vargas Foundation School of Law in Rio de Janeiro, told Al Jazeera.
“As he returns to office, Lula finds a Congress and a society more conservative than those of his previous terms. Their agenda is largely not the same as that of the Workers’ Party,” he added. “Lula isn’t as popular as it once was – and Brazil’s economy isn’t the same anymore.”
Political capital
Indeed, Lula has exhausted his political capital with a crusade against the central bank over interest rates, questioning the entity’s autonomy under its predecessor. At the same time, he has been criticized for minimizing it
both allegations of corruption against his communications minister and allegations of ties between his tourism minister and a local militia. Both ministers have dismissed the allegations as distortions.
Parliamentarians, who spoke to BBC News Brasil on condition of anonymity last month, said Bolsonaro’s recent return to the country after several months of self-imposed exile in the United States was based in part on an assessment of weakness within the Lula government, including his not triggering an economic recovery.
On the climate crisis, a major focus of Lula’s campaign, observers have also said they have seen little progress in the first period of his tenure. After the Bolsonaro administration watered down the country’s action plan to reduce emissions, Lula was expected to commit to substantial reductions.
“But so far nothing has been said about it,” Natalie Unterstell, president of Brazil’s climate policy think tank, Talanoa, told Al Jazeera.
Talanoa follows the repeal of previous government mandates that helped drive the process of dismantling environmental policies across the country, from fishing and logging to indigenous issues.
“Before the election, we identified 123 mandates that needed immediate revocation,” Unterstell said, noting that only 15 have been addressed so far.
“In the first days after Lula took office, we saw strong signals coming from the federal government, especially in the field of institutional reform. But since then progress has been slower – a direct result of the dismantling of the previous government.”
Road to growth
The Indigenous agenda has been a bright spot for Lula.
Between the restructuring of the country’s indigenous affairs agency, known as FUNAI; to restore funding to protect the Amazon rainforest; until the repeal of a Bolsonaro-era decree that allowed logging on indigenous lands, clear progress has been made thanks to the efforts of indigenous representatives in government, observers said.
Progress has also been made on foreign policy, especially given the international isolation imposed on Brazil by the Bolsonaro administration. Lula has resumed a policy of South-South relations, with the aim of strengthening cooperation between developing countries in the Global South.
In January, Lula announced that the Brazilian Development Bank would resume financing projects in neighboring countries, noting that this was essential to securing Brazil’s leading role in Latin American development.
Under the previous administration, “Brazil stopped developing and stopped sharing the opportunity of growth with other countries,” Lula said during a trip to Buenos Aires, where he met with Argentine President Alberto Fernandez and members of the Brazilian and Argentine business community . The two countries are also working on a common currency project as an alternative to the US dollar for bilateral trade.
On a broader scale, Brazil’s position within the BRICS economic bloc — which also includes Russia, India, China and South Africa — appears to be on the rise after four years of international animosity towards Bolsonaro, with former Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff elected last month as the head of the New Development Bank. Lula will travel to Beijing next week to meet the Chinese president.
But as Carvalho and other analysts pointed out, there is still a long way to go: “After 100 days of government, we still haven’t figured out where we need the most investment – not only from China, but also from abroad. investment in general,” he said.
At the same time, Carvalho added, Brazil has a chance to rebuild its diplomatic clout. if not as a mediator, then at least as a discussion partner.”
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