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| Lula: A Leader for the Poor Only |
| The Brazilian president's reputation among the middle class is reaching critical mass |
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Alan Mota (al0021)  |
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Published 2007-08-07 09:37 (KST) |
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For years during his long political career, Brazilian President Luis Inacio Lula da Silva was the underdog, a politician not much trusted by the majority of the population. But he always had a certain charisma among the middle class. From 1989, when he ran for president for the first time, to 2002, when he finally took office, Lula saw himself in a funny situation: an ex-factory worker born in poverty, he garnered votes from the left-leaning sectors of the elite and the middle class, people with college degrees and high paying jobs. The majority of Brazilians, mostly the poor, voted for well-dressed, elitist candidates with Harvard degrees from right-leaning parties.
As the 2002 elections came along, though, Lula worked hard to gain the trust of the poor (a strategy that many called "populism"). For many analysts, he only managed to take the leap that gained him the office after he finally conquered this parcel of the population, while calming down the middle classes, especially the rightists, with a moderate speech.
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FROM THE SECTION |
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| From then on, his situation took a 180-degree turn. Lula catered more and more to the poor and looked less and less to the middle classes. And when the first major corruption scandal exploded, in the run-up to the elections of 2006 (a scandal that Lula and his assistants dealt with in a pathetic manner, letting it grow into other scandals), the president had the better-paid citizens of the country against him. By 2006, when he was reelected rather easily (he had 60 percent of the votes in the second round), the amount of votes from the middle and upper classes was much lower than it had been in 2002. In fact, the overall voting inn the richest parts of the country gave, with few exceptions, victory to the rightist candidate Geraldo Alckmin. The bottom line: Lula was no longer the underdog, but he was also no longer the choice of the middle class.
More than not being the choice of the middle class, lately Lula is closer to being despised by them. The best example of this took place, ironically, at the biggest event of the decade in Brazil: The Pan-American games in Rio de Janeiro. At the opening ceremony, when the president of the host country traditionally makes an opening speech (and is traditionally applauded), Lula received such a massive hoot at the crowded stadium that the head of the Brazilian Olympic Committee, to avoid a bigger embarrassment (such as Lula not being able to speak because of the noise), quickly covered for the president and the ceremony went on without his opening words.
He wasn't quick enough, though, to avoid the official TV crew, which filmed Lula ready to speak and then sitting down with the speech still in his hands as the lights on him turned off. The episode reverberated throughout the media and served as a symbol of the rejection he faces from this part of the population. Indeed, it's hard to find someone among the upper classes that approves of his term, let alone someone who would vote for him again, or his successor.
His reactions might not have been the most appropriate ones. To the hooting at the games, he reacted by saying that the ones who booed him should be the ones applauding him the most. He, his assistants and his allies rebuffed the evident criticism by playing down the judgment of the middle class, as if they didn't know what they were doing. In the end, it's a decent exit strategy because ultimately the president and his entourage can still count on the overwhelming majority of lower class voters.
But the gap between Lula and the middle class has grown so great that both the leader and his government are beginning to worry -- mostly because with the rejection comes the media criticism. And in Brazil, it's well known what the media, which primarily caters to the middle and upper classes but influences the country as a whole, can do for politics. For example, among columnists and journalists there's a growing sentiment that Lula, in the last couple of years, degenerated into some kind of modern populist, with a exemplary economic policy, but cheap populism at the social sectors. The Bolsa Familia program, an income distribution system that is widely praised throughout the world, is seen more and more as the pivot of this populism, since it helps exclusively the poor. This worries the government especially because, in Brazil, "populist" is a very dangerous adjective, with the potential to destroy a good reputation.
However, the question to be asked here is why is the gap between what the lower classes want and what the middle classes want so big? And why does a politician usually fall into one taste or the other, very rarely pleasing both?
Before attributing this to political manipulation, or to the media, maybe we should assume that, after all, these two classes think differently. Or better yet, these two classes live in completely different worlds. Maybe that's why a president that is widely popular with the poor is absolutely hated by the middle classes and the rich, and a president that is not widely popular with the poor probably won't be elected at all. Furthermore, this might answer a question that has been around for decades, ever since Brazil began to elect its presidents: Why does a part of the population (sometimes the rich, mostly the poor) feel betrayed after a president is elected?
We can make a case study out of Lula's experience. For example, the latest downer for the president's reputation, the air traffic crisis, is primarily an upper class problem -- simply because the poor can't afford to fly. While the upper classes stage protests and journalists write their contempt in the papers, the majority of the country just watches the whole scene as if it were a sci-fi movie, wondering how it feels to actually be on an airplane. Even the corruption scandals, which destroyed most of Lula's flair with the rich, are something from another planet for the lower classes. The world of elaborate bribes and corruption schemes, with offshore accounts, white-collar gangs and political games is hard for them to understand, and it really doesn't bother them unless it reaches them directly. During Lula's era, it hasn't.
Now, let's take a certain news piece that was mostly ignored by the mainstream media in Brazil. Last week, a respected Brazilian institute of statistics published a study showing evidence of the link between income distribution programs such as Bolsa Familia and the reduction in social disparity that is going on in developing countries such as Brazil. For the upper classes, nothing changes, so it's not very important. But for the poor, it means that their lives just got better and that they're a little bit closer to the middle class lifestyle.
Social disparity, in fact, seems to be the missing link that forms this insurmountable gap between poor and not poor in Brazil. The country has had one of the leading Gini indexes, which measures social disparity, for years -- the biggest among key economies of the world. Maybe all these years of great disparity have entered the people's heads; in a way, these two groups have lived such different lives that they formed completely different mindsets. They have different ambitions, different tastes and look for different things in a politician. Therefore, it would be almost impossible for any man in an executive job, especially a president, to please both classes with just one political plan. At some point, the leader has to choose: One side will be pleased, the other will not; he usually chooses the stronger side.
The twist in Lula's case is that the stronger side of today isn't the rich side, as it usually is in Brazil. Or maybe the rich still make the stronger side, but they're not revolted enough, since the economy is doing well and more stable than ever before. They wouldn't want to risk this stability. And maybe Lula's "populism" isn't populism at all, but a fair program aimed at reducing social disparity, which will ultimately reduce the income gap to a point where the lower and the upper classes will live similar lives, and politicians won't necessarily have to lie to a part of the population to get elected.
Meanwhile, Lula has almost no perspective of seeing eye-to-eye with the upper classes, and only time will tell if his successor will be able to work with this "mindset disparity" as well as he did.
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©2007 OhmyNews
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