Former Brazilian president Lula Da Silva (R) embraces current Brazil’s president Dilma Rousseff upon her arrival at the Forum of Social Progress on December 11, 2024 in Paris. AFP PHOTO POOL REMY DE LA MAUVINIERE/Getty Images
When he passed the baton of a successful government and wildly popular Workers Party to Dilma Rousseff, now Brazil’s first female president, four years ago, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was expected to retreat from public life. And for a time, he did. But the emergence of a robust protest movement and festering anger at economic pain since the transition of power in 2010 has sparked calls for the former president and larger-than-life pol to return as a savior to a left-wing movement bitterly divided over everything from the upcoming FIFA World Cup to corruption and public-services problems.
Rousseff’s approval ratings took a nosedive this summer and though they have shown some sign of rebound in recent weeks, she’d at least require a run-off to secure another term — this despite her re-election having been widely seen as a sure thing as recently as last winter. The possibility that her brief time in office might rupture the party’s stranglehold on power has some anxious Workers Party muckamucks calling for Silva to return as a sort of apolitical hero who might overcome the divide between radicals in the streets and transactional center-left players who want to work within the existing system.
This is a familiar dynamic that we’ve seen play out between social democratic politicians in Europe and the United States and radicalized protesters since the global financial crisis of 2008, but that it has reached one of the world’s most unified left-wing activist cultures speaks to the power of the forces — like globalization — at play on one hand, and Rousseff’s failure to develop her own political identity on the other. After all, she essentially welcomed the image of technocratic steward of Silva’s activist state, a role well-suited to a roaring economy bolstered by the background presence of Silva — and an utter disaster if he were to consider angling for his old job back.
It would be wrong to count Rousseff out. Silva has yet to make any moves against her, and so we should assume he remains a (perhaps reluctant) backer. And opposition parties have gained some traction in the polls but face the risk of getting drawn too deep into the protests, which could alienate the center of the electorate when they get violent (as they have begun to). She should also be able to leverage her power to dish out public services and other goods that might have some political benefit. But her greatest strength here is also her greatest weakness: history. Namely, her party’s extended time in power and the opposition’s lack of any particularly compelling candidates. If Silva enters the fray, he captures all that goodwill and stalled momentum; indeed, his candidacy would deny Rousseff any of the traditional advantages of incumbency. The fact that she’s already described in some quarters as being Angela Merkel-esque is some worrying and hard-to-contradict evidence of that fact.
