[Inspired by Brazil’s president, Americans on the left consider
whether to match the international right with a movement of their
own.]
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LULA’S PLAN: A GLOBAL BATTLE AGAINST TRUMPISM  
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Alexander Burns
April 13, 2023
Politico
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_ Inspired by Brazil’s president, Americans on the left consider
whether to match the international right with a movement of their own.
_

Presidents Joe Biden and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva have some deep
policy disagreements, most of all on Ukraine. For now, they have muted
their differences to present a united front against homegrown forces
of autocracy and insurrection., Alex Brandon/AP Photo

 

Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva arrived in Washington earlier this year in
the glow of a glorious comeback. Freed from prison, elected to a new
term as president of Brazil and triumphant over a Jan. 6-style
insurrection, the left-wing populist seemed to embody the endurance of
democracy in an era of extremism.

But in private meetings with progressive lawmakers and labor leaders,
Lula delivered a dire message, according to four people present for
the discussions.

Though poisonous demagogues had fallen in both Brazil and the United
States, Lula warned that a global web of right-wing forces continued
to threaten political freedom. Voters crushed by economic inequality
and confused by a torrent of social-media disinformation remained
vulnerable to figures like Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro, the
brutish strongman whom Lula barely defeated last fall.

In Washington, the 77-year-old Brazilian leader issued a call to
battle: The left needed to build its own transnational network, Lula
said, to fight for its political values and take on crises like
economic deprivation and climate change.

Far-right leaders like Trump and Bolsonaro in the Americas had sought
each other out and found fellow travelers in European hardliners like
France’s Marine Le Pen and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.
No comparable club has existed on the left. In Lula’s view it was
time for that to change.

Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), the head of the Congressional
Progressive Caucus, said Lula wanted to mobilize left-leaning forces
against “an international network of right-wing people and
movements” that is seeking to “take over democratic countries.”

“He really was appealing to us, asking the Progressive Caucus to
build something that can counter that,” Jayapal recalled.

An initial step may come later this year, with a possible trip to
Brazil by congressional progressives. Rep. Ro Khanna of California, a
leading House liberal who also met with Lula, said the Brazilian
president urged lawmakers three times to visit.

Khanna said he had asked his staff to explore other international
forums where U.S. progressives should make their presence felt.

Lula’s exhortation represents an overdue challenge for the U.S.
left. For all the influence they have exercised on domestic policy,
left-wing Democrats have not yet managed to articulate a distinctive
transnational agenda.

That has been a missed opportunity.

It is not that progressives do not care about the rest of the world.
They just tend to engage it as a scattered array of flashpoints and
pet causes, without telling a more universal story about the struggles
of the 21st Century.

In Washington, many progressives have embraced President Joe Biden’s
chosen narrative about a grand contest between democracy and
autocracy, while lamenting the gulf between Biden’s rhetoric and his
tolerance of strategically useful tyrannies like Saudi Arabia. Yet
they have made only fitful attempts to lay out an overarching
left-wing agenda that starts with change in the United States and
extends across the larger world.

Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont has made the most developed effort,
calling in 2018 for an “international progressive front” against
oligarchs, despots, and multinational corporations. But his chief role
these days is chairing the Senate’s Health, Education, Labor and
Pensions Committee — a powerful post focused on the U.S. economy.

Matt Duss, a former foreign policy adviser to Sanders, said there was
a “growing sensibility on the left” about engaging more
consistently with partners in other countries, “not only in South
America but in the Global South.” The moment appears right, he
argued, for progressives to make their case for a transnational
politics anchored in traditionally left-wing economic ideas.

But U.S. progressives do not currently have a rich network of
relationships abroad to draw on.

“It’s an area where the left in particular needs to do a much,
much better job,” Duss said.

It is easy to overstate the global influence of the U.S. right.
Trump-linked provocateurs like Steve Bannon can barge into other
countries, declare the dawn of a new age of ultra-right nationalism
and generate anxious coverage in the mainstream press. But it has been
harder for these forces to win power and govern. Trump’s
endorsements in foreign elections have not amounted to much.

Earlier this year, my colleague Zoya Sheftalovich reported that panic
about Bannon-style meddling had receded in Europe: Věra Jourová, the
vice president of the European Commission, recalled a sense of fear
after 2016 that a character like Bannon might help ignite a
continental movement
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“It didn’t happen,” Jourová said.

Still, there has been political value for extreme conservatives in
thinking of themselves in global terms. It has helped them identify
trends and cultural attitudes that have driven elections across
national boundaries — anger about the Syrian refugee crisis, fear of
China, resentment toward big tech — and sharpen a common vocabulary
for discussing them.

On an intangible level, it has given a once-marginalized group of
ideologues a certain _esprit de corps_ that can translate into what
Americans call _swagger_.

Lula, who previously served as Brazil’s president from 2003 to 2010,
may be uniquely positioned among foreign leaders to summon the U.S.
left to the barricades.

Even before his return to power, Lula occupied a special place in the
imagination of U.S. progressives: a populist crusader in one of the
world’s largest democracies, a defender of the Amazon, an outspoken
American leftist through the era of George W. Bush. His imprisonment
in 2018, the result of a questionable corruption prosecution, made him
a political martyr.

There is an aesthetic component to his appeal to progressives that
helps obscure other inconvenient realities, like his equivocal view of
Russian’s invasion of Ukraine.

Consider the images from Lula’s last candidacy, showing a roaring
leftist fighter campaigning through destitute neighborhoods and
greeting ecstatic crowds from an open-top car. These are scenes
unknown to U.S. voters in our time. To many progressives, they look
like the best version of politics.

Lula’s imprisonment strengthened his long-distance relationship with
left-leaning lawmakers in Washington, who took up his cause. Sanders
led the effort, repeatedly calling for Lula’s release during his own
presidential campaign. Upon his release, the Brazilian politician
singled out Sanders for thanks.

“I hope American workers will make you US president,” Lula wrote
to Sanders on Twitter.

Senator Bernie Sanders' chief role these days is chairing the
Senate’s Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee — a
powerful post focused on the U.S. economy. | J. Scott Applewhite/AP
Photo

He continued expressing gratitude in Washington this year, meeting
with Sanders and thanking him and other progressives for their
support. When Lula sat down with union leaders, he was effusive. “He
wanted to thank the labor movement for standing with him,” said
Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of
Teachers.

With labor officials, too, Lula urged a transnational mobilization. He
pressed them to lead a “fight about working people and about lifting
up their economic aspirations, their living wages,” as well as
protecting the Amazon, Weingarten said.

In his meeting with congressional progressives, Khanna said Lula
described a certain form of progressive politics — focused on
economic advancement for the working class and fighting climate change
— as the antidote to a mood of despair that feeds authoritarian
politics.

“One of the interesting insights he had was that there was a
movement, not just in Brazil but around the world, of
anti-politics,” Khanna said, “and that people have so lost faith
in organizing and political activity, they have bought into the
narrative that everything is corrupt, everything is broken and
politics doesn’t matter.”

The solution, according to Lula, was a “hopeful, aspirational
politics” that gives voters confidence “that you can improve
people’s economic conditions,” Khanna said.

In some respects that sounds like a figure from closer to home: Joe
Biden.

The U.S. president and Lula have some deep policy disagreements, most
of all on Ukraine. For now, they have muted their differences to
present a united front against homegrown forces of autocracy and
insurrection. At the White House, each hailed the other as a champion
of democracy.

When I contacted Lula’s spokesman, José Crispiniano, about his
meetings in Washington, he shared a statement emphasizing Lula’s
admiration for Biden: “He was impressed and satisfied with the
commitment of President Biden with unions and workers.” He declined
to comment on Lula’s remarks about building up the global left.

Biden and Lula are similar in another important way. They are both
longtime national leaders who led left-of-center coalitions to victory
in part because they were resilient against right-wing attacks that
might have felled any candidate less familiar to voters.

Brazil’s finance minister, Fernando Haddad, who joined Lula in D.C.,
made that point to congressional progressives. “He said no one other
than Lula could have won,” said Khanna. According to Haddad, only
Lula was capable of overcoming the avalanche of bile and
disinformation directed at his candidacy.

There is no guarantee in either country that a leftist or center-left
message can succeed with another messenger.

That, too, is a warning and a challenge to progressives.

_ALEXANDER BURNS is an associate editor for global politics at
POLITICO. His Tomorrow column explores the future of politics and
policy debates that cross national lines._

_POLITICO strives to be the dominant source for news on politics and
policy in power centers across every continent where access to
reliable information, nonpartisan journalism and real-time tools
create, inform and engage a global citizenry._

* Lula da Silva
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* Brazil
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* Joe Biden
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* Donald Trump
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* Congressional Progressive Caucus
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* unions
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