Lula is inaugurated as president of very divided Brazil

Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was sworn in as president for a third time in Brasilia, the country’s capital, after beating Jair Bolsonaro’s bid to stay in office.

Lula was president of Brazil from 2003 to 2010, and his re-election is the culmination of a political comeback that has split the country into two very different political camps.

Since the last presidential election in Brazil was close and some of his opponents didn’t want him to win, it’s unlikely that his third term will be like his first two.

President Jair Bolsonaro of the far-right was defeated by the leftist on October 30 by a margin of less than 2 percentage points. Bolsonaro had been raising doubts about the accuracy of electronic voting in Brazil for months, and his loyal supporters were not ready to give up.

Since then, a lot of people have gathered in front of military barracks to protest the election results and ask the military to stop Lula from becoming president.

His most ardent supporters turned to what some officials and incoming Lula’s administration members dubbed “terrorism-related crimes,” something the nation had not seen since the early 1980s, and which has raised significant security concerns over inauguration day events.

“The event was really lovely in 2003. There wasn’t this gloomy, unpleasant weather “referring to the year Lula initially took office,” Carlos Melo, a political science professor at Insper University in Sao Paulo, said. “There is an environment of terror now.”

When student Tanya Albuquerque took a flight from Sao Paulo to Brasilia, she was overcome with emotion as she overheard local communists welcoming guests at the airport. After viewing images of Lula’s first inauguration, she made the decision to go.

“Perhaps tomorrow we won’t have 300,000 people here like it did then; this is a different and more polarising era. But I was aware that watching TV wouldn’t make me happy. Albuquerque, 23, stated on Saturday

Lula has made it his goal to bring unity to the country. However, he will have to do it while negotiating more difficult economic circumstances than he did during his first two terms, when Brazil benefited from the global commodities boom.

At the time, the main social programme of his administration assisted in bringing tens of millions of poor people into the middle class. Many Brazilians made their first trips overseas. His personal approval rating was 83% when he left office.

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Brazilians on average suffered significantly throughout the pandemic and the two severe recessions that hit the country’s economy in the subsequent years, first under the leadership of his hand-picked successor.

Lula has stated that battling poverty and making investments in health and education are his top priorities. Additionally, he has pledged to stop unlawful deforestation in the Amazon. To create a broad front and defeat Bolsonaro, he sought the backing of political moderates. He later appointed several of them to his cabinet.

According to Maurcio Santoro, a political science professor at Rio de Janeiro’s State University, it is extremely unlikely that Lula ever regains the popularity he once had or even sees his approval rating increase beyond 50% given the country’s political fault lines.

Furthermore, a thorough corruption investigation, according to Santoro, had Lula and his Workers’ Party’s credibility under fire. Party leaders were imprisoned, including Lula, until his convictions were overturned due to procedural irregularities. In the end, the Supreme Court decided that the trial judge had worked with the prosecution to get a guilty verdict.

According to Lula and his supporters, he was railroaded. Others were prepared to overlook any potential wrongdoing in order to remove Bolsonaro and unite the country.

But Bolsonaro’s supporters won’t allow someone they believe to be a criminal to hold the highest post again. And with tensions high, a number of things have led them to worry that violence would break out on inauguration day.

On December 12, numerous individuals attempted to break into a Brasilia federal police station and set buses and cars on fire in other parts of the city. Then, on Christmas Eve, police arrested a 54-year-old man who admitted to making the bomb that was found on a fuel truck going to the Brasilia airport.

Along with hundreds of other Bolsonaro supporters, he had been camped out in front of the army headquarters in Brasilia since November 12. According to extracts of his deposition that were made available to local media, he told authorities that he was prepared for war against communism and that he had planned the attack with others he had met at the protests. On the fringes of the federal district, in a wooded area, police discovered six bulletproof vests and explosive devices the following day.

Flávio Dino, who will replace Lula as justice minister, demanded last week that the federal government put an end to the “antidemocratic” demonstrations, calling them “incubators of terrorism.”

Lula’s team asked for the national guard to be sent out until January 2, and Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes banned people in Brasilia from having guns during this time.

The Federal University of Pernambuco’s political science professor, Nara Pavo, claimed that “this is the fruit of political polarisation, of political extremism.” Bolsonaro, who has mostly disappeared from the political landscape since he failed to win reelection, was sluggish to denounce recent events, according to Pavo.

Bolsonaro needs to maintain Bolsonarismo, and thus his quiet is deliberate, according to Pavo.

Just hours before taking off for the United States on December 30, Bolsonaro issued a final social media statement denouncing the bomb plan. It is still not clear who, against tradition, will give Lula the presidential sash at the presidential palace on the day of his inauguration.

Eduardo Coutinho, an attorney, will be present. As a Christmas present to himself, he purchased a ticket to Brazil.

After singing Lula campaign jingles on the flight, Coutinho, 28, remarked, “I wish I was here when Bolsonaro’s jet took off; that is the only thing that makes me almost as pleased as tomorrow’s event.” “I don’t typically act that out of character, but we need to let it all out, so that’s why I came here. “Brazil needs to move past this.”