Understanding Lula 3.0
Will more pro-business voices prevail in Brazil’s new government? AQ’s editor-in-chief looks to Lula’s long history as a guide.
One of the most insightful things I ever heard about Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva came from his sometime friend, sometime rival and immediate predecessor as president, Fernando Henrique Cardoso. “Lula is a union man,” Cardoso told me, “and union men understand that for the workers to do well, the owner must do well.” This is one reason why Lula can be so confusing to outsiders, and indeed to many Brazilians as well. He was always a leftist, in the sense that he made the poor his first priority. But Lula was never a communist or even a Marxist; rather, his formative years...
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