Brazil’s political developments and their relevance for Pakistan

For my readers in Pakistan the surprising victory of Luiz Inacio Live da Silvia to retake the office he had occupied as his country’s president for seven years may not seem very relevant for them or for the political developments in their own country. This may be the wrong way to look at political developments outside our own borders. In today’s globalised world there is not only near-free movement of finance and technology but also of ideas. What happens in one country affects others even if they are not immediate neighbours. I came to know Brazil as Vice President at the World Bank in charge of the institution’s operations in Latin America and the Caribbean for six years, from 1994 to 2000. I will have more to say about this experience later in this article.

Brazil is an interesting case of how the political world has been contaminated by Donald Trump, America’s 45^th president. His influence is not confined to the US where he is responsible for giving rise to open hatred of opponents who are left of centre in the political spectrum. Those hating belong to the extreme right of the country’s political divide. The latest example of this is the October 29 attack on the house belonging to Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House of Representatives in the US Congress. The man who broke into the Pelosi residence on October 28 was under the influence of Trump and his politics. He barged into the San Francisco residence of Pelosi, shouting “where is Pelosi?” — the same question that was asked by those who invaded the Capitol in Washington on January 6, 2021, looking for Pelosi and saying that they were going to hang her.

Pakistan — its policymakers and its citizens — should look closely at what has happened in Brazil, a distant land with a population of 217 million — only five million less than Pakistan’s 222 million. Brazil in other words is the world’s sixth largest country after Pakistan. It is Latin America’s largest nation and for the last four years it was governed by Jair Bolsonaro who was proud of the fact that because of the way he had managed his office, he had come to be known as Latin America’s Donald Trump. The American president also gave close attention to Bolsonaro and invited him to visit the White Office and meet with him in the Oval Office.

Lula’s narrow victory in the election held on October 30, 2022 contributes to the recent trend in this part of the world as a sharp swing of politics towards the left of the political spectrum. Lula joins a club of left leaders in Latin America who have been elected in Colombia, Chile, Peru, Honduras, Argentina and Mexico. Here I might quote from the coverage in The Washington Post of the election in Brazil. Lula’s “win which followed a slug-fest campaign in a deeply divided country awash in fake news and explosive rhetoric came amid allegations of official suppression of the vote by Bolsonaro’s allies and the police,” wrote the Post journalists.

The only time I met Inacio Lula was in early 1994 a few weeks after I had taken charge of the Latin American region. Sebastian Edwardes, then was the Chief Economist of the region with his office next to mine. Lula had come to visit him; Sebastian was well known in Latin America as an economist with good knowledge of the continent’s economy. He was originally from Chile and won his doctorate in Economics from Chicago University. He was one of the “Chicago boys”, who believed in neo-liberalism — that the best way to manage an economy was to leave it in the hands of the private sector. He was already installed in the office of the Vice President of Latin America when I took charge of the region. He and I had endless debates on our respective views about the role of the state in managing the economy. I favoured an active role of the state in the economy, in particular in regulating private enterprise so that the returns from private enterprise were not totally captured by the owners.

One day Edwardes walked over a bearded individual to my office. “This is Lula, the president of the Workers Party in Brazil,” said Edwardes by way introduction. “He has contested several elections for the Brazilian presidency but has not succeeded. He is a candidate once again. Like you he believes in an active role of the state.” Lula stayed with me in my office for about an hour and said he did not agree with Sebastian that the economy should be left entirely in the hands of private owners of economic assets. “They have little interest on helping the common folks. If I win, I am going to turn around the Brazilian economy with the state once again looking after common welfare. I don’t know if you have visited the favelas in the hills that overlook Rio de Janeiro. You can’t imagine how poor are the people who live there. They see from their homes the mansions of the very rich down in the plains of Rio.”

I told him of the Pakistani experience under Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto whose approach was to have the state directly control major economic assets in industry, finance and commerce. His nationalisation of a good part of the country’s economy had disastrous consequences. Lula was interested in my Pakistan story and explained that he was not talking about state ownership but state regulation. He fought for the presidency in 1994 and 1998, losing both elections to Fernando Henrique Cardoso. He won in 2002 and again in 2006. During his years in office 20 million Brazilian climbed out of poverty.

Lula’s very narrow victory raised the issue whether Bolsonaro would accept the result and, following the example of Trump, refuse to concede defeat. The defeated president waited for two days before delivering a two-minute long speech in which he indicated that he lost narrowly but refused to say that Lula had won. In the two days after the election, Bolsonaro’s supporters had blocked traffic on a number of roads, including the major highway connecting Sao Paula with Rio de Janeiro. The defeated president’s two-minute address was followed by an address by his chief of staff indicating that he and his colleagues would begin working on the transfer of power to a new administration.

There is no doubt that Trump’s behaviour in office and out of office as well after he left the presidency has set the stage for similar actions by leaders in other countries. Democracy is not complete unless the results produced by elections are accepted by those who contest them. While democracy returned to Pakistan in 2008 after General Pervez Musharraf decided to leave office and call elections, the Pakistani electorate have been to the polling stations three times. On each occasion the ruling party was voted out but did not fully accept the election results. Pakistan is one of the three countries in the Muslim world in which democracy as the way of governance is being tried. For the process to be fully complete, all major parties must find ways to work with one another.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 7^th, 2022.

Like Opinion & Editorial on Facebook, follow @ETOpEd on Twitter to receive all updates on all our daily pieces.