Brazil's Lula Has Little In Common With Brazil's New Left

They rally around him. Though it has little to do with him and more to do with proving a point: their side is right, the other side is wrong and mean and oppressive and — cranking up the volume on the social-media outrage machine — fascists suffering from all sorts of social phobias.

Ex-president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva is merely a symbol. He symbolizes the notion that those on the political left are society's biggest victims. Only, Brazil's new left are not the downtrodden, the illiterate, and the old. They are the well-educated and well-traveled. Like climate change will destroy the world in 12 years, they have no time to play nice. They must fight. They must resist.

In the Lula year's they resisted, too. Only it was different. They resisted a weak economy. They resisted a lopsided nation with the rich in the south, and deep poverty in the north. They resisted the government, that made all those things possible.

Then Lula's Workers' Party (PT) became the government. Then they nearly broke it. They got kicked out of power one by one.

Now Lula is in jail for his role in the Petrobras bribe scandal. He is the most famous national leader sitting in prison anywhere in the world, but he is no Nelson Mandela. Many people were victims of the scandals that unfolded in the Lula years. Thousands of people lost their jobs. Petrobras retirees saw their Petrobras shares drop 80% in value over an eight year period.

Brazil's left became radicalized again in 2016 when then-president Dilma Rousseff of the PT was about to be impeached. The party's splinter groups, created in Lula's first term when some politicians became dissatisfied with his government, have moved further left. Their supporters are like American progressives. On Twitter, their followers wear it with a badge of honor: leftist, esquerdista, Marxist, Marxista, Palestinian flags, Cuban flags, no Brazilian flags. Female gender pictograms, even if a man. Maybe even a nod to veganism, almost a sacrilege in Brazil.

Brazil's new left, led by academics and the jet-set version of the media A-list, consider Lula a political prisoner. Those right wingers —as now personified by new president Jair Bolsonaro — are out to get them all. First it's Lula. Then it's them!

Not too long ago, Brazil's intelligentsia were mostly all "tucanos", the nickname given to the Social Democracy Party (PSDB). Lula was uneducated, a simple man with bad manners who probably had dirty fingernails. He had more in common with the Brazilian working stiff than he had with a University of Sao Paulo professor. Now, Lula is suddenly their Che.

These academics — and surely their students who support leftwing politics — have more in common with their peers in the Bay Area of San Francisco than Lula's traditional base.

Brazil's new left is more in tune with Brooklyn, New York than with the men and women working on an assembly line in ABC Paulista. They have little to nothing in common with the poor guy in Pernambuco — Lula's home state — who sells oranges on the street corner. They worry about him, mostly from far far away. They might stress out about his pension on Twitter. If they Tweet more, maybe they can exact justice for their side.

In Brazil, big picture justice is symbolized by freeing Lula. His freedom proves their point: the courts are corrupt against them and greedy right wing politicians (or the media's preferred term, "far right" politicians) are running roughshod over them. Those in the opposition are racist. They are homophobic. They don't like women. It sounds eerily familiar, doesn't it?

Like here, they have YouTubers like the MamaeFalei channel (Momma Says) who send camera crews into left-wing protest movements to ask them questions. Sometimes they get punched in the face.

Like here, they have people who carve themselves up with swastikas in order to blame supporters of a president they hate. The story makes the rounds until it falls flat, raising way more questions than it answers.

Brazil's new left is as hysterical as ours.

The man they want free oversaw the ransacking of Brazil's greatest state owned enterprise, Petrobras, whose money subsidizes gasoline prices for the masses, donates millions to protect wildlife off Brazil's coast and in Brazil's Pantanal, and funds local movie productions. It was so bad for Petrobras once the truth came to light that some people on Wall Street wondered whether it would delist and default on its debt.

If Lula is innocent, and only Brazil's left and their international friends believe so, then at the very least he and the his party were asleep at the wheel. (Lula supporters won't even agree to that.)

Given the fact that the Petrobras bribe schemes happened under PT governments, then their incompetence created this mess, a mess that undeniably rests on their shoulders. It is unmatched gross negligence. (Lula supporters won't agree to that, either.)

Truth be told, Lula was one of the most beloved presidents in Brazil's modern day history. At a time, he was the most popular president in all of the Americas. Barack Obama referred to Lula as "the man" because he was so popular.

Many low income Brazilians like Lula not because of social welfare programs, but because Lula was brought up like them. He's a metal-shop worker who speaks their language, and did it well. He was, and is, quite a character and leader. Lula was for real. It is heart breaking for millions of Brazilians who support him to see him end up this way.

To Brazil's new left, saying Lula is in jail because he is corrupt is like calling them stupid, even if you're not calling them stupid. It drives them nuts. Lula is not corrupt. He is the victim of a witch hunt. He is innocent. If you don't see that, there is something wrong with you. It's like talking to a Democrat who thinks Russia still colluded with Trump, and that Trump is Vladimir Putin's spy in the Oval Office. If you don't believe that, it's because you are watching Fox News at prime time.

Lula has 8 more cases against him in the Petrobras Car Wash scandal. He will either be in jail or under house arrest for the rest of his life. It's sad for some, but true for all.

Lula stood up for the poor, but he was no modern day social justice warrior. He also was not one to get caught up in race relations like today's new left. He wasn't anti-gay, but give him a few shots of pingaand no doubt he would fire off something that would get him banned from Twitter if today's young liberal Brazilian was within earshot.

Also like the U.S. opposition to Trump, Brazil's left uses media and social media as weapon to ridicule and ostracize.

Facebook Brazil recently censored a conservative activist group called Movimento Brasil Livre from advertising this weekend's pro-Car Wash march. The temporary blocking of their account occurred on Tuesday, the group said, the day the Supreme Court was deciding Lula's fate again.

Facebook probably mistakenly blocked access to MBL's site (as always), but we can also assume Facebook's Brazilian progressives who hate Bolsonaro and believe Lula is a political prisoner didn't want people to know about the march today. By 11 am Sao Paulo time, car horns were already blaring down Avenida Paulista in support of the Petrobras investigators.

Who doubts that Facebook Brazil techies are not itching to define those organizers as a hate group? Who on the left of Lula doesn't think that MBLisa hate group? Lula never did this sort of thing, though he did once threaten to take away the journalism visa of New York Times correspondent Larry Rohter for an article that many journalists saw as a hit piece against Lula.

Which brings us to Brazil's new media outlets, offshoots of the American advocacy press. The HuffPo, Buzzfeed, and the The Intercept, led by Glenn Greenwald of Eric Snowden fame, haven given Brazil's progressive wing a new way to frame their issues, wrapped in an American brand.

Oddly enough, Greenwald is considered a "shill for Trump" due to his criticism of the media's handling of the Trump-Russia story. But in Brazil, Greenwald is the new left's gringo of choice. He was one of the only foreign journalists to interview Dilma during her impeachment, and Lula while in jail.

The opposition in Brazil hates this guy so much that words cannot be used here to reiterate their terms of endearment for him.

"The Intercept is basically expanding the international left’s view against the new government," thinks Thiago Aragao, a partner and strategy director for Arko Advice, a Brasilia-based political risk firm. "They see how that media strategy plays out in the U.S. and has chipped away at the populist government in Hungary," says Aragao, who is also a senior associate at The Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

It was Greenwald at The Intercept, not a mainstream Brazilian media outlet, nor one linked to PT like Brasil 24/7, that leaked conversations showing key Petrobras crime fighter, Sergio Moro, talking smack about Lula three weeks ago. It was a terrible look for Moro. Brazil's new left, of which Greenwald is surely a part (his husband, David Miranda, is a congressman and member of the Socialism and Liberty Party, PSOL), was convinced that Lula would be granted a mistrial.

The Intercept's story reverberated first on Brazil's Twitter. Then foreign correspondents in Brazil picked it up and ran with it, retweeting each other's comments, patting each other on the back in a veiled "I knew it!", praising the work of true investigative journalism.

The Supreme Court was forced to reconsider Lula's verdict thanks to Greenwald. But Greenwald failed to free Lula like the left had hoped.

Obviously, the Supreme Court did not have the evidence that Greenwald had and claims he has more of. His latest anti-Car Wash info may have as many gaffes as revelations, which is making Greenwald look like the Democratic Party advocates cheering on the Russia investigation, the very crowd he's been criticizing for nearly two years. It is unclear what other info he has, and whether it will be more damning than the next.

Brazil's new left looks formidable, but may really be a 200 pound weakling. Their strength comes from social media amplification, which then turns into global news stories by the traditional media whose reporters are following those voices on Facebook and Twitter, primarily.

"The volume of intensity from the left on Twitter in Brazil is equal to what you see in the U.S., but like here they just spend a lot of time whipping each other into a frenzy rather than looking at the facts on the ground," says Kevin Ivers, director of the DCI Group, a political risk consultancy in Washington, D.C.

PSOL Congressman Jean Wyllys — known by most in Brazil to be a drama queen — is a recent example of the new left's feeding frenzy on anything proving their oppression. Wyllys was receiving death threats. He says the threats were coming from Bolsonaro supporters. Bolsonaro is famous for saying he would disown his children if they came out as gay. Wyllys, who is also gay, said he did not feel safe in Bolsonaro's Brazil and packed his bags. He supposedly lives in Spain. Greenwald's husband Miranda took his seat in Congress.

The Wyllys story set Twitter alight. The international media picked it up predictably, yet another example that Brazil's choice of Bolsonaro over PT was a bad mistake.

PSOL is one of the PT splinter parties created in the early 2000s. It is mostly a Rio de Janeiro-based political party, full of people from high society who live in sheltered neighborhoods like Urca, and the activist-minded middle class who are trying to save Rio's shanty towns, known as favelas. They volunteer their time in poor public schools smack dab in the middle of Brazil's biggest war zone. People get shot and people die. It's a mess, not unlike Brazil's gnarly politics.

PSOL is the progressive Democrat, worried about human rights abuses by the state more than violent crimes committed by the citizenry.

The traditional PT "hard hat" voter is worried about getting his kid to school without getting caught in a crossfire between warring dope gangs. This is where the new left gets totally lost.

The sloganeering, The Intercept articles, the Free Lula movement and the talking points on Globo News have chipped away at Bolsonaro and Moro's popularity.

PT will survive. But PT is not the new left. Either progressives who wear the red star banner of the PT split for the red sun of PSOL or other tiny parties like the Communist Party of Brazil or they may realize that the bulk of the country does not see things their way.

As time moves forward and hopes of Lula returning dim, politicians from the progressive left will have to perform in order to bring in new voters. Under new laws designed to reduce the number of political parties in Brazil, a party needs 3% of the national vote or they are not getting a seat in the national congress even if they are winning larger percentages in Rio and Sao Paulo. The rule takes affect in 2030.

"They need to expand the progressive message nationwide to get more voters in order to survive," says Filipe Carvalho, a Brazil analyst for Eurasia Group in Washington, D.C.

Let's face it, the Lula left — or better yet, the Lula base voter — is low income, or from big labor. A minority of them are from academia and the student body, enamored by Lula's charisma. Brazil's new left is not that. They have more in common with AOC than CUT — that's New York's progressive newcomer Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and PT's biggest base, the Central Workers Union.

"Brazil's new left does not have the vision that the U.S. left has for the country," says Carvalho. "Their main issue is opposing Bolsonaro and freeing Lula. They are only held together by that bond."

Analyzing this from afar, and sticking with a U.S.-centric point-of-view, Brazil's new left got "woke." Lula was never woke. If he is freed from jail, he won't get woke. That's not who he is.

Lula's time is up. His best case scenario now is a mistrial — highly unlikely — or house arrest. The old left's hero is in jail. The new left is still searching for one.

If Lula's Petrobras bribery scandal never came to light and busted hundreds of people in the process, many Bolsonaro voters would prefer Lula over this this new crop of hysterical left wingers. Lula voters gave up on the PT because of Petrobras. That's how Bolsonaro won and the left lost. Bolsonaro might look at them from afar and wave, saying to them all: "tchau queridos!"

Source: Forbes.com

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