Lula no longer wants a Brazil for the future, he wants it now

Lula in his third presidential term is showing that he is in a hurry to rebuild the country inside and outside of it. In his eight months in office, he has traveled the world more than his predecessor, Jair Bolsonaro, did in four years.

There is a famous slogan: “The Brazil of the future.” It was coined by the Austrian Jew, Stefan Zweig, who in the mid-20th century took refuge in Brazil fleeing Nazism. Lula, upon his return from his trip to African countries, was blunt: “Brazil cannot continue being the country of the future for another century. We need to build it here and now.”

What Lula wants is that, without further delay, Brazil begins to grow and that this growth, he says, “is distributed among the population without continuing to be monopolized by the richest.” So that everyone and not just a minority “can have a better quality of life, with a home, food, clothing, work and all the best.” And this will be possible, according to him, “if we get the rich to pay taxes and the poor to enter the budget.”

According to Lula, this is what he has begun to do “removing taxes from those who earn less and increasing that of the rich.” And he gave the example of Europe where people are better off because there is a fairer contribution from taxes.

The trade unionist of the past has understood that times have changed and with them the world of work, since if yesterday it was a privilege to have a permanent job, today the youngest prefer to work on their own, to create their small business. For this reason, in addition to announcing that in the coming years he plans to create two million permanent jobs, he has also announced a ministry that never existed such as that of small and medium-sized businesses.

Lula, who suffers this time from not having a majority in Congress to approve his social proposals as the majority is still occupied by the Bolsonaro parties, has been clear: “The deputies and senators no longer represent the working class while it is essential to know about “what part are they?” And referring to the new economic law of his Government with strong social overtones, he said: “We have done what is most fair and sensible. And now I hope that Congress protects the poorest this time.”

Lula was also referring to the new law that for the first time has proposed increasing taxes on large fortunes and funds placed abroad by the rich. The president highlighted what everyone already knows and that is that in Brazil “the richest people pay less taxes proportionally than the poorest.”

With irony, Lula stated: “What is not lacking in Brazil are cunning people who always find a way to circumvent the law to avoid paying taxes and in the worst case scenario they always manage to get projects approved in Congress that benefit a minority.” .

Lula went further and recalled that one of the big problems of Congress is that its members no longer represent a majority of Brazilians but a minority: “Let’s be clear. Elected deputies and senators are no longer representatives of the working people. They are sectors that come from the middle class, liberal professionals, many ranchers. “The majority belong to the upper middle class.” And he added: “When a project comes to vote, they do not do it in the interest of the majority of the people, they do it in favor of the society in which they live.”

Lula went ahead in his confession with which he publicly committed to fighting to finally create the Brazil of today, not the one of tomorrow that never arrives. “This is how we are going to build the Brazil of today: there will be people who are going to shout, but this is how we are going to rebuild it.”

The president, who knows that this will most likely be his last term, has wanted to make it clear that he is committed to the recovery of the majority of the country and its eternal minority. Hence its agenda full of strong social overtones, whether you like it or not, this time to the minority that accumulates the majority of the wealth of a country rich in everything and that today is the center of great global concern: the defense of the environment, since it has most of the Amazon, lung of humanity.

Lula, who does not lack political sense, knows that in his two previous mandates as well as that of his pupil, Dilma Rousseff, the environment and the defense of the tropical forest were not exactly the center of attention. This is revealed by the fact that the current Minister of the Environment, Marina Silva, was then forced to leave the Government after failing to impose her proposals.

Judging by his speeches, Lula seems to have understood that the world has changed since his days as a rebel unionist where he organized the great workers’ strikes, just as the conditions of these new workers are changing. And she has understood that in the last four years of the extreme right-wing government, Brazil has taken many steps backwards and it is urgent to recover what has been destroyed.

If Lula and his government are having to build with a hostile Congress in mind, it is because more than their foreign policy they should focus on their own country. A country that remains crucified with its majority of poor people who cannot make it through the month, with a racism that refuses to die, with a burden of violence that increases every day and with the eternal resignation of those who have lost hope for better days .

And in a country in which the youngest, who are the future of the country, dream of going abroad in search of what they cannot achieve here and where they lose hope, interest in politics and democracy.

Lula will surely go down in history if he manages to pull Brazil destroyed and humiliated by Bolsonarism out of the rubble. Yes, to the Brazil of today, without waiting any longer for the future, to the Brazil that had begun to lose hope threatened by the ultra-global wave that evokes the darkness of times that seemed to have ended forever and that are beginning to re-emerge with new fears and chills. .

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