We can hold it as a sign of hope – not only for Brazil, but Latin America and globally. With Lula, as he is popularly known, Brazil can return to democracy and to a more social and just society.
Above all, his candidacy offers hope for the poor, who suffer most under president Jair Bolsonaro’s policies.
It also offers a chance to halt the devastating destruction of the Amazon rainforest, and the re-emergence of the indigenous Karipuna peoples’ plight on the ‘Lula agenda’.
The Karipuna people face continued land grabbing of their forests by corporates and powerful logging and cattle farming interests.
Bolsonaro’s authoritarian regime ignored them completely.
“The biggest legacy of my presidency is not the programmes that took 30 million Brazilians out of absolute poverty and created 15 million jobs.
“It is the accountability of the public institutions and real partnership with business, labour and civil society that brought hope to the people. We put the needs of the people first. Not ours,” Lula said in 2012 when he met social democrats from around the world in the capital Brasilia.
THE CHOICE
Unfortunately, Lula did not get an absolute majority in the first round of the election and the gap between him and Bolsonaro wasn’t big.
A Lula victory in the second round, this Sunday, 30 October, will be in the interest of the world.
The choice for Brazilians is between authoritarianism and democracy, between dark times ahead and the hope of a better future.
Lula offers hope for the poor.
During his two terms as president, Lula – a former union leader and founding member of the Workers’ Party – identified the need to stabilise the macro-economic environment.
He did this by introducing pragmatic policies and through collective leadership and transparent dialogues, even with his fiercest critics.
Lula is the antithesis of the ‘big man’ syndrome and political arrogance that characterises many governments, including in Namibia.
Here, synchronised chants of so-called “processes, systems and institutions” essentially serve to cover incompetence in the government and a failure to get to grips with corruption.
COMBATING POVERTY
Lula consolidated and expanded Conditional Cash Transfers (CCTs), firstly under Zero Hunger and later Bolsa Familia, now the largest such scheme in the world.
Its four sub-programmes included educational stipends to boost school attendance, maternal nutrition, food supplements and a domestic gas subsidy, which benefited some 30 million of Brazil’s poorest people (Hall, 2006).
Breaking the inter-generational cycle of poverty became the hallmark of the Lula presidency compared to what has been fed to us by president Hage Geingob, under the Harambee Prosperity Plan.
One only has to look at the question marks over Namibia’s oil and gas revenue, and the genocide reparation talks with the Germans.
The Landless People’s Movement supports Lula and the progressive forces in their campaign to win the second round of voting on Sunday.
We believe international solidarity with Lula and the Workers’ Party is more necessary than ever in our efforts towards creating a culture of new internationalism and global solidarity on food sovereignty, small-scale farming, and reducing poverty, inequality and unemployment.
* Henny H Seibeb is the deputy leader and chief strategist of the Landless People’s Movement (LPM)
