The definitive biography of Brazil’s president, ‘Lula!’

0:12Hello and welcome to the Monaco Weekly. I'm Fernando Augusto Pacheco and today I speak with writer Richard Lapper on his new book, Lula, The Man, The Myth and a Dream of Latin America.

0:31Richard Lapper, welcome back to Monaco Radio to talk about your new book about someone that we know very well, Lula, the man, the myth and a dream of Latin America. First of all, I think Lula is such a character. I think he really defines Brazil in many ways. And even you say, you know, he's not simply a Brazilian politician, is he?

0:53Richard Lapper:no he's not Fernando and thanks for inviting me onto the the show again he's not just uh any other politician I mean for three real reasons I think I mean his his life story embodies the journey that many poorer Brazilians have made over the past 75 years during which time Brazil has changed from a predominantly rural country, a poor rural country, to an urbanised country. You know, one of the most urban countries in the world, some of the largest cities. Now, Lula started his life in a drought-stricken small farm in Pernambuco in the northeast. He was born in 1945. He was abandoned by his father.

1:47Richard Lapper:and in 1952, he, his mother and his siblings made the journey, precarious, odysseic journey of 13 days to Sao Paulo, then a growing industrial city. It was a 13-day journey. They had a foot of room on this lorry each. There were 60 people on the back of a lorry. They had to sleep under the lorry. It was an extraordinary journey. Lula then, in Sao Paulo, was really living the life of a, you know, someone akin to living in a favela, really. He was hungry a lot of the time. You know, he was close to his family, but he had to help out making a living selling peanuts and oranges. In the late 1950s, he got a position as an apprentice to become a metal worker, and it changed his life.

2:44Richard Lapper:He joined a growing industry, metal-bashing industries in the south of Sao Paulo, and took to it immediately. He was a lathe operator. He became, in the late 60s, a trade unionist. And he took to that even more, because by nature, like many Brazilians, Lula is an extremely cordial, friendly man. He gets on with people. and he was responsible at the union for looking after people's social rights, what pensions they were due, what redundancy payments they might expect. Became an expert. He became extremely popular. He became leader of the union in 1972 and he led, in the 1970s, extraordinary strikes against the military government.

3:34Richard Lapper:The military taken over in 1964, strikes were banned. Lula had this strike wave, three years of strikes, that were extraordinarily brave. And that really earned him a position as a celebrity in the Brazilian media. Brazil was slowly democratising, and these strikes were part of that. In 1985, the military withdrew from government, and Lula developed his struggle for social justice, for the people he'd grown up with, really, through the political system forming the Workers' Party. That's one reason. Would you say, I don't know, you have to tell me your other reasons, but there is something about Lula as well that is very pragmatic.

4:15Sometimes I feel that Lula is almost bigger than the left because he's a man that can talk, of course, to his constituencies, the left, but he can talk to the right as well.

4:24Richard Lapper:I think very, very crucially important is his pragmatism. You know, the myth of Lula is that he's a rambustious, radical guy akin to Hugo Chavez of Venezuela or Fidel Castro of Cuba. And these were his friends when both men were alive. And he identified with that movement. His party, the PT, the Workers' Party, is quite radical. But Lula, by nature, I think, is quite a cautious figure. He's a negotiator. He learned to negotiate in the trade union movement. He's always said in his interviews that he really values even small improvements rather than big promises. So he's quite different, in a way, to the wave of 21st century socialism populists, you know, the Venezuelans and Argentines.

5:12Richard Lapper:He's quite different because he's concentrated on practical improvements. The really important thing about all this is that Lula's committed to economic stability, keeping inflation low. And that really explains the relative success of Brazil during the Lula years compared to Venezuela under the Chavez and Maduros and Argentina under the Kirshners. Brazil kept going forward. Social conditions improved. It avoided the volatility. Political scientists have called that strategy, if you like, reform without rupture. It's not about violent revolutionary change. It's about slow change within the system.

6:02Richard Lapper:And to a large extent, this has been successful. And Lula, he does have a survival instinct. You were talking about, you know, how he grew up, you know, in poverty-streak in northeast of Brazil. And maybe that's why even after going to jail, for example, he had this remarkable victory in 2022. I mean, what a comeback, right? I mean, I think Lula is the man of comebacks as well, right? Yes. I mean, perhaps in parenthesis here, just say a little bit about the corruption charges against Lula. to get involved in politics as an outsider party. The PT, when it was formed in 1980, was really a radical party.

6:42Richard Lapper:It disliked the give-and-take, the petty corruption, which has always characterised Brazilian politics. But to get to power, to win the elections in 2002, and then to retain power, the PT had to engage in that dirty deal-making business and it backfired on them it backfired on them with the corruption scandals of the 2000s the Mensalao scandal the Lava Jato scandal and when the political tide turned in the 2010s for a whole variety of reasons we've talked about before in Beef Bible and Bullets. Lula fell victim to that. His successor Dilma Rousseff was impeached and Lula was imprisoned. Now, there's no doubt that the conservative movement in Brazil wanted to see an end to Lula.

7:39Richard Lapper:They wanted a return to the status quo. And in 2018, they achieved it with the election of Bolsonaro. That was another extraordinary twist in Brazil's story. Bolsonaro won that election in 2018. But the mood changed again in 2020. Lula was released from prison. The charges against him were annulled. The judge who had condemned him was found to be biased. And Lula, allowed to compete, won that election in 2022. Now, those conservative movements, you know, the Beef Bible and Bullet Lobby, were still there. Brazil had moved perhaps even more conservative than it was in 2018. Lula managed to hold together an alliance of many of the people he'd fought against in his early career.

8:30Richard Lapper:Geraldo Alckmin became his vice president. Alckmin had been his main opponent in 2006. So this was an incredible turn. And in Congress, as ever, However, Lula did not have a majority. This, to all intents and purposes, Lula's governments have been minority governments. He's had to fashion alliances willy-nilly with parties that are much more conservative than his own workers' party. Now, that's been a very difficult process. And Lula will be the first person to tell you that he doesn't have complete power. And many of the wishes, many of the desires of left-wing Brazilians, younger left-wing Brazilians, it's impossible to deliver them.

9:18Richard Lapper:The political conditions are not there. Brazil's moved is a much more conservative country than it was 25 years ago. And our political system, not many people know this, Richard, as well. We have, I don't know, more than 20 political parties in Congress. It's very different from a country like the UK or the US. It's really challenging, right, to govern with a majority. I think it's practically impossible, I would say. It's an incredibly fragmented system. I mean, there's not a very close relationship between voters and their representatives. In Britain, for example, we have constituencies. You can theoretically at least go and see your MP and they're surgerists.

9:58Richard Lapper:This is far from the case in Brazil. Brazil has giant constituencies. The deputies and senators sit in Brasilia, which is a city, you know, several thousand miles away from where most people live. It's another world. It's a bubble. And this separates a lot of Brazilians from day-to-day political life. So it does pose particular problems. parties are not cohesive the pt is cohesive really perhaps to the left of lula but other parties there was a party in the 2000s led by fernando enrique cardoso a kind of clinton or blair of brazil really a social democrat a moderate social democrat that party is more or less disintegrated.

10:46Richard Lapper:So we have parties that for the main part are self-interested. They really care about themselves and their followers and their families. This is what Brazilians describe as physiological. The relationship between the public and the private in Brazil is much more blurred than it is in Europe or North America. It's what social scientists call patrimonialism. Brazilian historians like Boa Quir de Orlando have written about this. This is a very unusual feature of Brazil. And it makes governance quite complicated. I agree. I have a question for you. It's a two-in-one question. First of all, I want to ask, is Lula the favorite to win this year's election?

11:38And on the other hand, does he have a successor? Because I personally don't see that. And that's a bit of a problem for the Brazilian left.

11:48Richard Lapper:Well, succession is a big problem. No one within the PT has the kind of credentials in terms of life story that Lula has. Lula is an unusual phenomena even internationally there aren't many leaders in the world today that have not had further education Lula is a very unusual figure in international politics it used to be the case when the Soviet Union they had people who were just skilled workers go back to the 1940s and Britain had a foreign secretary well Ernest Bevin who was a trade union leader hadn't been, not had much education at all. But this is not the case nowadays. Lula's really exceptional in that sense.

12:34Richard Lapper:So in Brazil, even, there's no one that really approximates him. This year's election, he's going to be 80 contesting it. Opinion polls suggest he could well win, but it's not inevitable. His main advantage is that the right-wing parties in Brazil are divided. Jair Bolsonaro is in prison. Nevertheless, he and his family have insisted on running a candidate with a Bolsonaro name. And this is Flavio Bolsonaro, who's a representative in the Brazilian Congress, Jair Bolsonaro's oldest son. Many people on the right are not happy about that, and they're looking to run their own candidate and that is probably going to benefit Lula.

13:25Richard Lapper:The other thing that's going to benefit Lula is that the economy this year is picking up a little bit. Brazil's got very high interest rates but next month they'll fall. There'll be a bit of a fair win behind Lula for the election. It's going to be tight. You know Lula won 2022. He won by really small margin. I was in Sao Paulo at the time when Lula won. And, you know, we didn't know until 70 % of the votes had been counted that Lula had won. People were really nervous. And Brazil remains quite divided. For all Lula's story and popularity, a lot of people do not like him. A lot of people want big changes to the Brazilian state, which is quite large and, you know, could be better.

14:18Richard Lapper:and that will militate against him. I probably will put my money on Lula. Might be wrong. I think I would do too. But I just want to ask you as well about Lula on the international stage. Do you still feel that he is an inspiration for other leaders, especially from the left? Or is that fading a little bit? Because I think when he came back to the international stage, as you say in your book, everybody wanted to talk to Brazil again, right? including the US under Joe Biden? Well, very good question. You know, I mean, I think there's two problems Lula's got in that respect. One is that in relation to the traditional hard left, you know, the sort of Marxist influence left, and in Latin America, that's been quite a force over the past 50 years.

15:09Richard Lapper:You know, the Cuba-inspired left, Hugo Chavez and 21st century socialism. I think people on that side of things always distrust Lula. They don't think he's radical enough. They think he's made too many compromises with neoliberalism, with a market economy. So they dislike his realism and his pragmatism. Those tensions have risen, actually, in the past few years. Lula is pushing very hard for Nicolás Maduro to step down after his fraudulent victory in the 2024 election. Although Lula's criticised Maduro's capture by US forces and his imprisonment, he's not shouting that loud about it. He's not been that confrontational personally with Donald Trump.

16:03Richard Lapper:Brazil broke diplomatic relations with Nicaragua, one of the remaining radical regimes in Latin America with, you know, sort of little North Korea, a nasty little regime. And Lula has dislikes them intensely. Now, they still haven't renewed diplomatic, a very unusual step for Brazil. So with that faction of the left, Lula's not well placed. On the other hand, with a democratic left, the social democratic left, the British Labour Party, the French and German social democrats, with people like Gabriel Boric in Chile, who's a sort of a younger left winger, they don't like the fact that Lula's cosied up to the authoritarian regimes of Russia and China.

16:56Richard Lapper:You know, Brazil's foreign policy is all about the global south. It prioritizes links with Russia and China and India because they are, as Brazil sees it, emerging powers like Brazil is. But Brazil, I think, has been a little, not blind, they know that Russia and China are authoritarian regimes, but they're anti-Western regimes. You know, what applied 20 years ago when the BRICS were formed is not really the case now. And when Lula, as he did in 2023, criticizes Zelensky, the Ukrainian leader, for causing the war, people look at him in an askance. They cannot credit Lula would say that. as one Chilean social democratic friend said to me, it's like blaming a man who's been attacked by a knife-wielding maniac for being attacked.

17:56Richard Lapper:They don't believe it. And that, I think, undermines Lula's credibility in Europe, no question about it. And so I think Lula's international profile is a tricky one now. He's not got his natural allies on the left. Some of his natural allies on the left in Latin America are thinking he's too soft. And his natural allies in the social democrat left, Biden's another good example, think he's way too close to the Russians and the Chinese. It's a tricky situation, right? Trying to win it all and then you lose it all, in a way. It's a really difficult furrow to plow, that, for Lula. And just finally, I want to ask you as well, because, of course, you wrote a great book about Bolsonaro in 2021, one about Lula.

18:43But what's your connection with Brazil? So tell us, you know, what do you love about Brazil? Or what do you hate as well about Brazil?

18:51Richard Lapper:So my connection with Brazil is fundamentally that I'm married to a Brazilian, Fatima. That's the best connection ever. And I've had a longer standing connection with Latin America. I mean, a lot of my journalistic career has been at the Financial Times. and at the Financial Times probably about more than half the time I was involved in Latin America and somewhere or another. I've written about other things as well but Latin America has been a kind of enduring interest and I'd begun to interest myself in the region back in the 1970s when I was at university. That's when I first got to know about the sort of wave of military dictatorships and Fatima, who I met in 1998, was my Portuguese teacher and she's from Salvador, the northeastern city of Salvador in Bahia and we have many, an endless number of cousins in Brazil.

19:48Richard Lapper:It's extraordinary the number of cousins she has and we go there quite often. So that does give you a certain sort of emotional connection to Brazil. Fantastic. Muito obrigado, Richard. Thank you so much. Lula, The Man, The Myth, and A Dream of Latin America is out now, published by Bloomsbury. I'm Fernando Augusto Pacheco, and this show was edited by Jack Dewars. Thank you for listening.