Because the country’s slide is now occurring under a socialist president, it isn’t attracting the same condemnation as it did under the previous right-wing leader.
Because the country’s slide is now occurring under a socialist president, it isn’t attracting the same condemnation as it did under the previous right-wing leader.
T here is an entire genre of academic and popular writing about “democratic backsliding.” That term refers to the phenomenon where countries that had been democratizing reverse course and return to autocratic tendencies.
That’s the sort of thing that can happen under any party or politician. Yet it seems that to many, it’s “democratic backsliding” only when a right-wing party or politician does it.
The latest example of this double standard is in Brazil. When right-wing president Jair Bolsonaro was in power, there was a steady stream of articles about democratic backsliding in Brazil. Now that left-wing president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has succeeded Bolsonaro, the epithet is hardly ever applied to Brazil, even though backsliding is still very much evident.
Much of the criticism of Bolsonaro was accurate and deserved. Bolsonaro supporters attacked all three branches of the Brazilian government after his defeat in the 2022 presidential election, and he allegedly was coordinating with the military to stay in power. He has been indicted for abusing power as president and prohibited from running for office through 2030.
You don’t have to be a Bolsonaro supporter to see that Lula is not a liberal democrat. His 2022 victory was a return to power after having served two terms as president, from 2003 to 2011. During his first tenure, Lula was extremely corrupt, with the full scale of his corruption only revealed later, during a multiyear investigation after his presidency.
That corruption was in service of a sweeping left-wing agenda. A surge in global commodities prices gave a massive boost to Brazil’s natural-resource-heavy economy when Lula took office in 2003, giving him plenty of revenue that he redistributed along socialist lines. “His administration, marked by profligacy, suffocating debt, and statist regulations (for instance, in the energy sector), took a heavy toll on his country once the commodities boom dissipated, causing Brazil’s longest recession,” Álvaro Vargas Llosa wrote for NR in 2022.
Lula’s chosen successor, Dilma Rousseff, took the corrupt leftism to new heights and was impeached and convicted by the Brazilian legislature. As Gabriel de Arruda Castro pointed out for NR at the time, her supporters called her removal from office a “coup,” despite it having been done entirely through constitutional means and with the support of the people’s elected representatives.
“For old-school socialists, a ‘coup’ is anything that blocks their path to absolute power,” Castro wrote in that piece. “‘Democracy’ or ‘revolution’ is everything that goes in the other direction, even when the rule of law is suppressed.”
A similar dynamic is at play with Lula 2.0. He defeated the right-wing Bolsonaro, so that’s a win for democracy, even if it means support for authoritarian governments abroad and the suppression of free speech at home.
Consistent with his first two terms in office, Lula has been on a tear cozying up to some of the worst governments in the world. After causing controversy by hosting then-president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2009, Lula allowed Iranian warships to dock in Brazil in 2023. He is tight with Vladimir Putin and supported a Chinese-backed proposal that would have allowed Russia to keep much of the territory it is trying to take from Ukraine. With China itself, Lula has sought closer economic and security ties. He successfully pushed to have Rousseff named chairwoman of the New Development Bank, a China-backed alternative to the World Bank.
After having cultivated close ties with Hugo Chávez during his first presidency, Lula has sought to restore them with Nicolás Maduro, Chávez’s successor in Venezuela’s socialist dictatorship. Bolsonaro had cut ties with Venezuela and, along with the U.S., had recognized opposition leader Juan Guaidó as the legitimate president of the country after sham elections in 2018. Lula invited Maduro to Brazil in 2023 and said that U.S. sanctions on Venezuela were based on a “constructed narrative of authoritarianism.”
Lula then claimed he was “frightened” by Maduro’s rhetoric before this year’s Venezuelan election, which Maduro stole from rightful winner Edmundo González, who has since fled to Spain for asylum. Rather than insisting that González be inaugurated, as democracy would demand, Lula would not even admit that he had actually won and instead called for a do-over election.
Lula came into power promising to fight climate change and “misinformation,” to the applause of the Left around the world. Kent Lassman wrote for NR about Lula’s warm reception as president-elect at the COP27 climate-change conference in 2022. “The fight against climate change will have the highest profile in the structure of my government,” Lula said. Climate-change activists frequently seek international agreements to accomplish what they can’t get voters to support in ordinary legislation.
The fight against “misinformation” has led to Brazil joining the world’s autocracies in banning X, formerly known as Twitter, within the country. The supreme-court justice who banned the website, Alexandre de Moraes, is a political ally of Lula’s. Lula supports the ban and has said it should serve as an example to other countries.
None of this should come as a surprise from the 78-year-old former trade-unionist Lula. Socialists don’t believe in freedom, and they believe in democracy only insofar as democracy allows for socialism. Right-wing parties are a majority in the Brazilian legislature, so expect additional authoritarian measures from Lula.
As Milton Friedman said in Capitalism and Freedom, economic freedom is not some incidental thing that’s nice to have; it is part and parcel of overall freedom. “Intellectuals in particular have a strong bias against regarding this aspect of freedom as important,” Friedman wrote. “They tend to express contempt for what they regard as material aspects of life, and to regard their own pursuit of allegedly higher values as on a different plane of significance and as deserving special attention.”
If intellectuals care about promoting democracy worldwide, it should bother them that the president of the second-most populous country in the Western Hemisphere is a batty old socialist. If it doesn’t, then maybe democracy isn’t what they actually care about.