Left-wing environmental protections and social progress when sworn in as president
Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva tearfully vowed to pull Brazil out of Jair Bolsonaro’s era of “devastation” and launch a new era of reconciliation, environmental preservation and social justice after being sworn in as president.
Holding back tears as he addressed the tens of thousands of supporters who filled the square in front of Brasilia’s presidential palace, Lula declared the end of “one of the worst periods in Brazil’s history” of the far-right former president.
“[It was] an era of darkness, uncertainty, and wonderful suffering. but this nightmare is over,” Lula said, vowing to bring the bitterly divided South American country together and govern not just for those who elected him in October’s historic elections. , however, all 215 million Brazilians.
“It is not in anyone’s interest that our country is in a constant state of turmoil,” Lula said, urging citizens to rebuild friendships destroyed during years of hate speech and lies. “There are two Brazils. We are one people. “
The veteran leftist, a former factory worker who served as president from 2003 to 2010, collapsed as he outlined plans to wage a war on hunger, which he called “the ultimate serious crime committed against the Brazilian people. “
“Women rummage through garbage to feed their children,” said Lula, 77. “Entire families sleep outside, exposed to cold, rain and fear. “
Brazil’s new president mentioned his right-wing predecessor by name. But he criticized the damage caused by Bolsonaro’s four-year tenure in which nearly 700,000 Brazilians died from a poorly managed covid outbreak, millions plunged into poverty and deforestation in the Amazon skyrocketed.
“No to amnesty! The crowd shouted at Bolsonaro, whom many brought to justice for sabotaging Covid containment efforts and vaccination against a disease he called a “little flu. “
“Bolsonaro killed my son. He was 20 years old when he died,” said one man in the crowd, Waldecir da Costa, his hands trembling with anger as he held a photo of his expired son on his phone. “I need you to pay for everything you’ve done. “
Addressing Congress a while after taking the oath of office on Sunday afternoon, Lula said that “the evil of a denialist and obscurantist government that treated people’s lives with insensitivity” the pandemic deserves not to go unpunished.
Bolsonaro fled to the United States on Friday and refused to hand over the presidential sash to his leftist rival, as is democratic tradition.
Instead, in a deeply symbolic and emotionally charged rite in front of the presidential palace, this task was completed by Aline Sousa, a black tea picker and recycling activist from the Brazilian capital.
Lula climbed the ramp to the palace, flanked by eight representatives of Brazil’s varied society, plus one of its most respected indigenous leaders, Raoni Metuktire, a rap and metallurgist DJ, and a 10-year-old boy.
Vivi Reis, a leftist politician from the Amazon, shed tears as she looked at Lula’s entrance. “After so many tragedies and a government that plunged Brazil into anguish and hunger, we now see that we have triumphed over this. We are here, we resist and we won.
Huge crowds of Lula supporters flooded the streets of the Brazilian capital to celebrate the sensational political renewal of a guy who, just over 3 years ago, languished in prison on corruption charges that were later overturned.
“We feel unfathomable relief,” said journalist Arimatea Lafayette, 59, as revelers dressed in red marched Sunday morning to the construction of Congress to toast the return of Lula and the fall of Bolsonaro, who has settled in the Florida mansion of an MMA fighter. It is not known when he plans to return.
“We went through 4 years of terror and now we feel free,” added Lafayette, who had flown in from the northeastern state of Alagoas wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with Lula’s face on it.
Franceli Anjos, a 60-year-old feminist, had driven 55 hours from the Amazonian city of Santarém to witness the long-awaited end of Bolsonaro’s chaotic rule. “I am convinced that a new spring has arrived,” she said.
Lucas Rodrigues’ hands trembled with emotion as he described his joy at Lula’s sensational return, just 20 years after the former union leader was Brazil’s first working-class president in January 2003.
“All of Brazil is here, this is what Lula is capable of,” the 25-year-old said after getting off a bus in the southern state of Santa Catarina, where he belongs to the landless workers’ movement.
Lula’s American biographer, John D. French, said he believed that after pointing to the war on hunger, a hallmark of Lula’s first government, the new president’s most sensible precedent would be to reunite a bitterly divided country after a toxic electoral crusade marked by violence.
“I think what he would like would be a matrix of generalized reconciliation . . . and a relief in the degrees of conflict,” French said, although he warned that this would be complicated given the poisonous abyss between the Lulists and the Bolsonaristas.
“The concept that everything is going to be roses, peaches and cream [is wrong]. I think it will be a very conflictive time.
Bolsonaro’s defeat in the October election, which he lost by 2 million votes, sent a wave of relief to progressive Brazilians desperate to see the back of a guy they accused of destroying Brazil’s environment and standing in the world.
French said the relief was reminiscent of Democrats’ reaction to Donald Trump’s passing in 2020. “[People] were like, ‘Ugh, okay, now things can go back to normal. ‘”
“But they haven’t generalized again in the United States. And it is not incidental to go back to some kind of placid generality [in Brazil either]. “
However, the mere prospect of a new beginning under a progressive and inclusive government of Lula, who pledged to combat environmental crimes and appointed an indigenous woman to head the first ministry for Brazil’s indigenous peoples, extremely cheerful sympathizers who flocked to the capital. .
“I know that it will not be easy for Lula to rebuild everything that Bolsonarism destroyed. But I am hopeful. If there is anyone who enjoys the popular and foreign respect of the global leaders necessary to rebuild Brazil’s relations with the world, it is Lula. ” said Diogo Virgílio Teixeira, a 41-year-old anthropologist from São Paulo.