I don’t even want to repeat it, Brazil is back.
Since returning to the Brazilian presidency, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has shown something of a preference for foreign policy, potentially to the detriment of domestic politics. He’s travelled the world, appearing at almost every international summit that will have him, with the articulated goal of repositioning Brazil on the world stage. But there’s an argument that he should be paying more attention closer to home. Last week as Lola rubbed shoulders with fellow world leaders at the G7 summit in Italy, a dispute bubbled away at home over a controversial abortion bill and the President sought to stay out of the discussion. Will that cost him dearly over time? That’s what we’re going to be exploring today. My name is Euan Marshall, Deputy Editor of the Brazilian Report, which is the journalistic engine behind this podcast. Or you can go the extra mile and make a donation
to our newsroom, tipping our journalists via our Buy Me A Coffee page. And you can also subscribe to our Buy Me A Coffee fan page, pledging a monthly contribution to our newsroom in exchange for exclusive content that you won’t find anywhere else. Our Buy Me A Coffee find anywhere else. Our Buy Me A Coffee subscribers are… Emerging Market Muser, Ana Lund, Peter Sufron, Ederson da Silva, and someone who chose to remain anonymous.
Now before we go back to today’s episode, we’d like to show you a little bit of our news series. Today we are going to talk about religion, politics and geopolitics with international reporter Adriana, tell us a little about your characters, please.
Who are these believers who leave Brazil to convert people in the Middle East? It’s hard to believe that, you know, a Brazilian, a middle class, educated Brazilian with two small children would move to Afghanistan to run a pizza delivery business in a war-torn country. So I was very suspicious. I thought they were either, you know, mercenaries or drug dealers.
Afghanistan is the largest opium exporter in the world. And so I thought there was something there and I ordered pizza. And that’s how my journey began.
What you’ve just heard was a part of our interview with Adriana Kavrinka about her book, Soul by Soul, which tells the story of a Brazilian family who went to Afghanistan in the 2000s hoping to convert Muslims to Christianity. The Brazilian reports 2B Red where authors translate Brazil is our new book club series. You can hear the latest episode on the Explaining Brazil feed as a podcast or if you want to watch the video interview you can
join our community on Patreon. The link is in the show notes. Now back to this Someone who has been keeping a very close eye on Lola’s international and domestic performance is Andre Pagliarini, Assistant Professor of History at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia and a columnist at the Brazilian Report. And he was kind enough to speak to us for this week’s show. Andre, so Lola is just back from the G7 Summit in Italy. What is it about these international events that he seems to enjoy so much? And
you know, how might that differ perhaps from his predecessor Jair Bolsonaro?
Lula very clearly relishes these international summits. And he’s comfortable there in a way that his predecessor Jair Bolsonaro visibly just never was. And so I think when Lula is at these these meetings, he projects a confident, progressive vision of a country that is still developing in Brazil, a country that has been through a lot in its history, but has so much potential that remains largely untapped, largely underdeveloped. And we often see goodwill towards Lula, who brings a kind of boundless energy and enthusiasm
to these meetings. ideas aren’t necessarily welcomed or at least won’t be acted upon in specific concrete ways but he brings a kind of commitment to multilateralism and a belief in government that seems to be infectious with other leaders. They just seem to like to have him around.
One of the big features of Lula’s third presidential term so far has been this thirst and desire to get involved in foreign policy discussions and perhaps a lack of engagement when it comes to domestic policy. Because traditionally Brazilian voters are driven by jobs, health and security and foreign policy is typically quite far down on the list of important topics. How is Lula’s focus on foreign affairs over domestic issues during his third term affected his ability to navigate Brazil’s current political landscape? And what are the implications of his reduced engagement
with a more conservative congress compared to his previous terms.
From the very beginning of this third term Lula has been much more interested in foreign affairs than domestic affairs. I think that’s been quite obvious from the beginning. He’s travelled extensively with some good reason. The idea that he constantly pressed was that Brazil needed to show the world that it was back, that it was re-engaging the rest of the world productively after it became largely a pariah under Bolsonaro. And so there was, I think, some logic to that, to show the world that Brazil is back in many
ways. The downside, and people close to the president have sort of complained about this off the record very often, is that the downside of that attention abroad seems to be a lack of attention at home. Lula became arguably the most successful president Brazil ever had in his ability to press his agenda through sheer force of persuasion to legislators who are not necessarily predisposed to support left-wing or progressive ideas, but Lula, through his training and union organizing and just his sort of life story and his personality, has long been able to negotiate
things with a reticent Congress. He seems less engaged in doing that this time, and there are several reasons for that. It could be a question of sort of a stamina and focus that Lula’s obviously an older man than he used to be, and maybe his patience just isn’t what it was to deal with a Congress that is much more conservative than it was in years past. And that is saying something. But it’s also the case that he just, as the chief executive, has fewer buttons to press,
fewer levers to pull with Congress was that were things like cabinet positions. You know, that still is important. But under the Bolsonaro years, we saw a much heavier emphasis, a big shift in the power of Congress towards determining spending, basically pork barrel spending, the emendas de relator and things like this that give Congress so much more power beyond the control of the executive.
So Lula has fewer ways to press members of Congress. This is not to say that ordinary Brazilians necessarily care about the situation in Ukraine or Israel and all of that, but I think the extent to which Lula is seen to be either out of step with the rest of the world or leading the rest of the world. I think that’s where many ordinary Brazilians look to evaluate Lula’s performance.
Did Lula say something that other people around the world, the consensus seems to be, was a crazy thing to say? Did Lula say something that makes a lot of sense, but other people around the world just aren’t seeing it the same way? So I think it has to do much more
in evaluating Lula’s foreign policy performance at home with how does this fit into a broader narrative about Lula and Brazil’s insertion in the world as opposed to this or that specific issue. It’s how does this contribute or not towards Brazil’s relevance in the world.
One of Lula’s international agenda points is the redesign of multilateral institutions. Could you explain to us if you will what he means by that specifically and what impact could that have on the international community?
Lula has long talked about how the post-war global order designed in large part by the United States and other allies after World War II, you know, the UN Security Council especially the UN itself, but also the IMF, the World Bank as Lula correctly identifies them as the Bretton Woods institutions. He’s long talked about how these in large part have outlived their utility and the argument has made is that the world has changed so dramatically that to continue to invest overwhelming
power in the hands of a small set of countries that were dominant in many ways, you know, 70 years ago and that remain dominant in a lot of ways, but they’re not the only countries that matter. And so he’s advocated for a bigger role for countries like Brazil, India, many more African countries that are growing at an accelerated rate economically in terms of population, in terms of trade with the rest of the world. And so, you know, specifics have sometimes been vague, but he’s talked in broad terms
about increasing the democratization of these institutions. And I think this is worth noting because, you know, sometimes when Lula talks about Brazil’s participation in the BRICS as a counterbalance to US power in the world. Much is made about that, that this is a kind of a negative that much of the world holds against Lula. But I would also point to his investment in the UN
and other multilateral institutions. I mean, Lula’s critique is that these institutions should be strengthened, that they should be opened more, that more countries should have more power. And I think that that’s a message that many, many countries buy into. I think it helps to explain some of the goodwill Lula receives when he travels through Africa,
parts of Asia, the rest of Latin America. It’s a message that given Brazil’s size, he can really press. He’s got millions of citizens behind him. Other smaller countries that sometimes don’t feel they’re being heard, they appreciate, I think, the initiative Lula demonstrates on that issue. Even if, again, you know, sometimes the specifics aren’t as tightly defined as they might be.
So while Lula was in Italy, the big topic here in the public debate was the fast-tracking of a particularly backwards abortion bill, which sparked significant protests in the country and a bit of a concession from the right-wing conservatives as well. Not wanting to go into too much detail about it, essentially this is a bill that would equate abortion after 22 weeks of pregnancy to murder, even in cases where abortions are permitted in Brazilian law. So explain to us a little bit Andre what went on with this legislation, how did Lula react and what does that tell
us about his domestic engagement?
What was striking about Lula’s reaction to this proposed legislation regarding abortion was his cautious approach to it initially when he was in Europe. You know, in the past when Lula has been asked about Israel’s war in Palestine, Russia’s war in Ukraine, he often just, you know, spouts off and says things that vary, sometimes very strong, very passionately. Sometimes, you know, other people close to him have to kind of walk it back a little bit later. But in this case, very tellingly, I think, when he was asked about the question of abortion in Italy, he was very circumspect. He said, well, you know, let me think about this. Let me get back to Brazil.
I’m on a foreign trip now, and then we’ll talk. You know, that kind of hesitation, I think, was really put off many people on the left, the progressives, and generally speaking, many of those opposed to this proposed legislation, which really struck a nerve. And it seems to have been a major sort of political misstep by evangelicals in Congress and really reactionary legislators. And so Lula, you know, gave a stronger denunciation shortly thereafter.
But I think it was a clear example of what is a kind of imbalance between Lula’s enthusiasm clearly his initiative abroad as opposed to a reactionary, sometimes responsive, sometimes slow response to domestic policies and the shifting tides of conservative versus progressive opinion on many of these issues. It’s not an era that seems to be animating Lula very much in this third term.
Now there’s been a big push from the current government since the 2022 election to show the world that Brazil is back after four years of international ostracism under the former far-right president, Raul Bolsonaro. But one could argue that this focus on the international community to the detriment of politics at home could simply lead to a right-wing return at the next election. How do you see that calculation?
Lula is clearly interested in restoring Brazil’s geopolitical position and in fact elevating it in terms of international institutions, multilateral forms of governance. None of that is possible, of course, if he loses the next election or if his party can’t sustain a coherent ideological governing platform. So this is why the balance really matters here.
Lula is probably right that the challenge facing democracy in Brazil and elsewhere is a global challenge and it requires global solutions, global articulations, global organization. But that cannot come at the detriment of a domestic political agenda because while Lula has paid less attention to pressing social issues and economic issues at home, the nitty-gritty, the day-to-day grind of legislating, we’re seeing some real advances of far-right initiatives in Congress and beyond. This proposed abortion law is just the most emblematic of these. It’s the one that got the most attention
and the most pushback, but there needs to be a more concerted effort to correct the balance here here between foreign policy and actions abroad from the president and in order to sustain that keeping down and defeating a far-right project that is
its main challenge at home. And that was our interview with Andre Pagliarini assistant professor of history at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia and a columnist at the Brazilian Report. If you like Explaining Brazil please give us a five-star rating wherever you get your podcasts. Or better yet, subscribe to The Brazilian Report, the journalistic engine behind this podcast. We have a subscription-based business model and your memberships fuel our journalism and keep
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I’m Euan Marshall. Thanks for listening and Explaining Brazil. We’ll be back next week.
Transcribed with Cockatoo
