BRASILIA (Realist English). The Brazilian authorities have very low credibility both at home and abroad, said in an interview with The Financial Times newspaper76-year-old former President Lula da Silva, who intends to take part in the presidential elections in October this year.
“The Brazilian elite has a slave-owning mentality,” he stressed, recalling the criticism directed at him when his government formalized the hiring of domestic workers. “You know what they said here in Brazil when the traffic was bad? That it’s a disgrace that Lula allowed poor people to buy cars.”
The ex-president believes that from the moment he left office, the country began to live poorer: “I find more unemployment, more people going hungry and Brazil with a government that has very low credibility at home and abroad.”
If he wins the autumn elections, Lula will title a finance minister who will not be an economist however a talented politician suggested by a bunch of specialists, as he did in his first time period. He desires to assessment labour reforms enacted after the PT (Partido dos Trabalhadores – The Workers’ Party) left workplace and says he’ll overhaul the tax regime — a transfer the Bolsonaro authorities tried however failed — to make the wealthy pay extra.
Despite his hostile rhetoric, Brazil’s financial elite will not panic at the thought of Lula’s return. The fixed political turbulence of the Bolsonaro administration has unnerved the enterprise group regardless of the implementation of some financial reforms, equivalent to limits on public sector pensions and a few privatisations.
“Lula is not an institutional threat,” says one senior banker. “We’ll lose some quality in economic policy but it won’t be a reversal.”
In May, the leftist politician said he intended to “rebuild the country after the rule of the irresponsible criminal” Jair Bolsonaro. The current president is also going to nominate his candidacy in the elections to be held in October.
From 2003 to 2013, Lula da Silva served two terms as President of Brazil. In 2017, he was sentenced to 9.5 years in prison in a case of corruption and money laundering. The ex-president spent a year and a half in prison, but then the Supreme Court declared the detention illegal because all appeals were not exhausted. In 2021, all charges against him were dropped.
