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 Editorials | November 2006 
The Lula Myth
 Jean-Marcel Bouguereau - Le Nouvel Observateur
| | Brazil's President Ignacio Lula da Silva greets supporters in Sao Bernardo do Campo. Silva won re-election with 60% of the vote as Brazilians rewarded their first working-class leader for reducing poverty and improving the economy.(Andre Penner/AP |
In 2002, he was already the best elected president in all the history of Brazil. He has just been re-elected with a score of over 60% of votes, slightly less than in 2002. This man, who began his career as a shoe polisher, has succeeded in overcoming all obstacles, including those linked to a vast corruption scandal - his government having been accused of purchasing the votes of certain deputies.
Once, in the face of ordeals, the formal metal worker become union leader compared himself to a local martyr for Independence who was hung and quartered in 1792 by the Portuguese colonial authorities. "If they cut off my legs, I'll walk with your legs; if they cut off my arms, I'll work with your arms; if they cut out my heart, I'll love with your heart; and if they cut off my head, I'll think with your head."
Contrary to the legend that says a man of the people betrays his class when he reaches supreme roles, Brazil's popular classes have identified with him. Granted, the former revolutionary whose party brought together labor leaders, Trotskyites, and leftist Christians has, with the passage of time and battles, become a social democrat.
Even the series of scandals that have cast a shadow over the workers' party for over a year, forcing several officials to resign, have not succeeded in driving Lula down. But above all, he has succeeded in demonstrating that his pragmatism as a former union leader could enjoy a peaceful coexistence with the market's economic demands and that one could reconcile the latter with the moral imperatives of an equity that, in this fundamentally unequal country, is the sole key [to change].
Brazil owes its social protection to Lula: he resumed the "Family Stipend" programs that now benefit 11 million destitute families or 44 million people, which explains - along with the increase in the minimum wage and the increase in pensions - the reduction in illiteracy, progress in primary education and the reduction of poverty. In three years, the minimum wage has gone from 85 to 125 Euros per month, increasing far faster than inflation. Now, it remains to reform a profoundly unequal and archaic country and to decant its growth.
Jean-Marcel Bouguereau is Editor-in-Chief at the Nouvel Observateur and an editorialist for the République des Pyrénées, for which this article was written.
Translation: t r u t h o u t French language correspondent Leslie Thatcher. |
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