A people's president
Brazilian President Lula is setting precedents and conquering hearts and minds in the Middle East, writes Faiza Rady
On a whirlwind business visit to Cairo and the region, aiming to promote trade links between his country and the Arab world, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva -- popularly known as Lula -- rapidly came, saw and conquered. Addressing a meeting of Egyptian and Brazilian business women and men at the Presidential Qubba Palace on Monday, Lula introduced himself as "the first Brazilian leader to visit Egypt since Emperor Pedro II came to Cairo in 1876.
Renowned worldwide as the anti-capitalist globalisation leader who was feted and cheered at this year's Social Forum at Porto Alegre, Lula is a president with an alternative kind of vision.
True to his Porto Alegre pledge to invest in Southern solidarity, Lula came to the region to promote his vision. In Lula's words, he came to the Cairo to "establish fairer and more equitable trade relations between countries of the South". This, Lula believes, is particularly crucial because "Southern countries have always privileged their trade relations with the rich at the expense of their relations with each other".
Aspiring to develop the still largely untapped economic potential of developing countries and promote the strength of Southern economies, Lula noted that "we have not yet realised 30 per cent of our trade capacities". This being especially important at a time when so-called First World countries protect their own economies from Southern imports by maintaining protectionist trade tariffs or other forms of subsidies, explained Lula.
In the wake of the recent Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) meeting in Miami, and the Bush administration's push to transform the Latin American continent into the world's largest tax-free "supermarket" servicing the United States, President Lula is attempting to form a Southern trade block between Latin American and Arab countries to challenge North American global hegemony.
Treading on yet uncharted grounds, Lula's personal attempt to affect Latin American-Arab rapprochement would be the first since Emperor Pedro's historic visit to Cairo.
But, then, President Lula is renowned for establishing precedents. A case in point, Lula is this century's first working- class president. Also, among world leaders Lula is the one and only high-school dropout. A poor boy who left school at 14 to work and help put food on the family table, Lula got his early political education in the trade unions where he rose through the ranks to political prominence.
A former president of the Metallurgists' Union and a former leader of the Brazilian Workers' Party (WP), Lula's party programme included the formation of a "shadow government" with alternative policies to the neo-liberal model. A radical critique of the World Bank (WB) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) featured prominently on the WP's platform, which denounced both institutions for being the "enemy of the people". As leader of the Workers' Party, Lula strongly opposed the WB's and the IMF's loan conditionality and structural adjustment programmes, which he exposed as depleting country resources and imposing unsustainable debt burdens and, hence, abject poverty on the South.
Brazil is a prime example. Mired in debt, the government has to pay a staggering 32.7 billion euro per year for debt servicing alone. President Lula has inherited an economy burdened with a debt that depletes an estimated 55.1 per cent of current accounts.
Annual debt servicing effectively exceeds the combined budget allocations for health and education. As a result, working conditions in both the private and public sectors have considerably worsened over the last decade. In 2000, only 45 per cent of the work force was employed in the formal sector -- down from 53.7 per cent in 1991 -- while an estimated 55 per cent of the workers barely eke out an existence in the informal sector: peddling their products on street corners and, more often than not, hustling to survive on the streets of the country's sprawling mega cities. Fifty million Brazilians survive under the poverty level of less than one dollar a day.
Exposing the work of "the enemy of the people", Lula launched his presidential campaign on an anti-poverty ticket -- aimed at combating poverty and achieving "zero hunger" by the end of his mandate.
While exposing the international money lenders, Lula based his programme on the pursuit of economic, political and social equity in a country infamous for exhibiting the most blatant income disparities worldwide.
In this context, the statistics for land distribution are especially damning. "Brazil is fat with land," say the Landless Peasant's Movement (known by their Portuguese acronym, MST) -- a movement that naturally belongs to Lula's constituency. Barely one per cent of "fat" landholders own 44 per cent of the land leaving 360 million acres lie fallow -- while more than 15 million seasonal agricultural workers remain landless.
However, since Lula assumed the presidency in January he has had very little room to manoeuvre against the "enemy of the people". Throttled by the debt, Lula was forced to move against his party programme and his own constituency by imposing a sales tax, capping public sector pensions and raising the retirement age. As a result, public sector workers organised strikes against their left-wing president, while the MST chose to take a wait-and-see position, although some MST leaders say that time is running out and the landless are too hungry to wait around until Lula courts the "enemy".
In fact Lula's stringent social austerity measures have earned him high ratings from the IMF, which congratulated him on his achievements since January. Thus the IMF extended Brazil's $30 billion loan agreement to next year, granting the country a $14 billion standby extension. Having earned his high marks with the money lenders, Lula's attempt to forge an alternative trade block may be an attempt to distance himself from the "enemy of the people".
