I don’t know anymore if it’s social networks or if it really became a vice of Brazilian rulers to embarrass themselves abroad. Lula has already arrived in Portugal with problems due to his declarations about the invasion of Ukraine. It was perhaps the quickest dehydration of international goodwill with a Brazilian ruler.
Let’s start with our first lady, Janja. She had already announced to the four winds that she would not be discreet. It turns out that she announced at length that she would be empowered. And now she makes headlines playing the 1950s housewife.
Spotted in a luxury store, she put together a whole social media narrative of buying a tie for her husband. Only a sexist country like ours could believe that this is her function. The presidency has ceremonial and staff capable of preparing the President of the Republic for any and all occasions.
In my mother’s generation, before the turn of the century, it was already a little shameful for a woman to take care of her husband’s clothes and for him to accept it like a little child. This was taken for granted until my grandmother’s generation, where the woman was a kind of housekeeper and the man barely knew how to make tea by himself.
I didn’t understand why to pass on this image of dazzle and become news just in an event like that. All I had to do was choose the item and send an employee to fetch it and there would be no news about this picturesque event.
Let us now return to the president, trampled by the necktie story. The international community’s support for Lula was massive. He was seen, during the elections, as a guarantor of the continuity of Brazilian democracy. It was the counterpoint to what abroad knew of Jair Bolsonaro, the violent and cruel verbiage.
Before the trip, one of the main political publications in Europe, Politico, ran the headline: “Lula goes from hero to weirdo”. Lula goes from hero to weirdo. It was not expected of him, the guarantor of democracy, the positions he had in recent weeks in relation to Russia and China.
The paquitas of Brazilian politicians are content with any explanation. That is why influential luloaffectives invent far-fetched versions according to which Russia and China have something to do with maintaining democracy. There will always be a sucker to believe, repeat, like and share.
Unfortunately for us, Europe is more difficult. Our colonizer, Portugal, which is used to dealing with support for Russia by other countries it colonized on the African continent. But this was not expected from Brazil. Mainly, this was not expected from Lula. He was the counterpoint to the rapprochement with Putin and his religious-political discourse curdled with intolerance against minorities.
Lula even said verbatim about the invasion and genocide in Ukraine: “when one doesn’t want to, two don’t fight”. It was awkward, but Latin American populists can act like that because everything is excused from them. Now, she even said verbatim that she never compared the two countries. There will be those who believe. Anyone who dares to question will be immediately stamped as extreme right, Bolsonarism auxiliary line, fascist, Nazi or whatever.
In Portugal it was different, they decided to charge Lula with firmness and politeness. Our president said that he did not understand the question. In all sincerity, we are the ones who are still not understanding anything.
There are two possibilities. Lula may have understood the question and used the subterfuge of pretending he didn’t understand to buy time to answer and cool the situation down a bit. The other is that he may have heard a very clear question and not really understood. Honestly, I can’t say which situation is worse and more vexing.
#ashamed #Brazilian #political #institution