International

Tough choices as Brazil’s Lula gets down to business

Photo: Carl de Souza / AFP

| By AFP | Marcelo Silva De Sousa

Fresh off a celebratory beach holiday, Brazilian president-elect Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva got down to uglier business Monday: figuring out how to govern with a hostile Congress, nasty budget crunch and impossible-looking to-do list.

The political horse-trading of the transition period now starts in earnest for the veteran leftist, who will be sworn in for a third term on January 1, facing a far tougher outlook than the commodities-fueled boom he presided over in the 2000s.

Lula, 77, celebrated his narrow win over far-right incumbent Jair Bolsonaro in the October 30 runoff election by escaping last week to the sun-drenched coast of Bahia in northeastern Brazil.

He joked he needed a belated honeymoon with his first-lady-to-be, Rosangela “Janja” da Silva, whom the twice-widowed ex-metalworker married in May.

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His other honeymoon — the political one — could be short, analysts say.

Lula is meeting Monday with advisers in Sao Paulo. On Tuesday, he will travel to the capital, Brasilia, to finish assembling his 50-member transition team and start negotiating with members of Congress, two allies told AFP.

He faces a battle to get bills passed in a legislature where conservatives scored big gains in October’s elections.

Lula’s coalition has around 123 votes in the 513-seat Chamber of Deputies, and 27 in the 81-seat Senate, meaning he will have to strike alliances to get anything done — and even just survive, given the threat of impeachment in Brazil, where two presidents have been impeached in the past 30 years.

Into the shark tank

Lula is expected to meet in Brasilia with lower-house speaker Arthur Lira, a key Bolsonaro ally from the loose coalition of parties known as the “Centrao,” a group known for striking alliances with whoever is in power — in exchange for feeding on the federal pork barrel.

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Lula will be under pressure from the Centrao not to oppose the so-called “secret budget”: 19.4 billion reais ($3.8 billion) in basically unmonitored federal funding that Bolsonaro agreed to allocate to select lawmakers to boost support for his reelection bid.

Meanwhile, money will be tight for Lula’s campaign promises, including increasing the minimum wage and maintaining a beefed-up 600-reais-per-month welfare program, “Auxilio Brasil.”

Bolsonaro, who introduced the program, did not allocate sufficient funding to continue it in the 2023 budget.

“We can’t start 2023 without the ‘Auxilio’ and a real increase in the minimum wage,” the leader of Lula’s Workers’ Party, Gleisi Hoffmann, said Friday.

“That’s our contract with the Brazilian people.”

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Facing the impossible math of funding such pledges without breaking the government spending cap, Lula’s allies are exploring their options, including passing a constitutional amendment allowing exceptional spending next year.

But they are racing the clock: it would have to be approved by December 15.

Markets watching

Lula, who ran on vague promises of restoring Latin America’s biggest economy to the golden times of his first two terms (2003-2010), faces a bleaker picture this time around.

“The challenge is… how to balance fiscal responsibility with a highly anticipated social agenda,” in the face of high inflation and a possible global recession, said political scientist Leandro Consentino of Insper university.

Markets are watching closely — especially his pick for finance minister.

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Lula is expected to split Bolsonaro’s economy “super-ministry” into three portfolios: finance, planning, and trade and industry.

Analysts predict a political choice for finance minister, a technocrat for planning and a business executive for trade.

Names floated for the finance job include Lula’s former education minister Fernando Haddad and his campaign coordinator, Aloizio Mercadante.

COP27 stage

Other closely watched portfolios are the environment and a promised new ministry of Indigenous affairs — both sore spots under Bolsonaro, who presided over a surge of destruction in the Amazon rainforest.

The former job could go to Lula’s one-time environment minister Marina Silva, credited with curbing deforestation in the 2000s.

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In a key gesture, the president-elect will make his return to the international stage at the COP27 UN climate summit in Egypt, where he will arrive on November 14, advisers said.

Silva, who will travel with him, told newspaper Folha de Sao Paulo: “The climate issue is now a strategic priority at the highest level.”

International

Chile declares state of catastrophe as wildfires rage in Ñuble and Biobío

Wildland firefighting crews are battling 19 forest fires across the country, 12 of them concentrated in the Ñuble and Biobío regions, located about 500 kilometers south of Santiago.

“In light of the severe fires currently underway, I have decided to declare a state of catastrophe in the regions of Ñuble and Biobío. All resources are now available,” the president announced in a post on X.

Authorities have not yet released an official report on possible casualties or damage to homes.

According to images broadcast by local television, the fires have reached populated areas, particularly in the municipalities of Penco and Lirquén, in the Biobío region, which together are home to nearly 60,000 people. Burned vehicles were also reported on several streets.

“The Penco area and the entire Lirquén sector are the most critical zones and where the largest number of evacuations have taken place. We estimate that around 20,000 people have been evacuated,” said Alicia Cebrián, director of the National Disaster Prevention and Response Service (Senapred), in an interview with Mega TV.

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In recent years, forest fires have had a severe impact on the country, especially in the central-southern regions.

On February 2, 2024, multiple wildfires broke out simultaneously around the city of Viña del Mar, located 110 kilometers northwest of Santiago. Those fires resulted in 138 deaths, according to updated figures from the public prosecutor’s office, and left approximately 16,000 people affected, based on official data.

International

Former South Korean President Yoon sentenced to five years in prison

Former South Korean president Yoon Suk-yeol was sentenced on Friday to five years in prison for obstruction of justice and other charges, concluding the first in a series of trials stemming from his failed attempt to impose martial law in December 2024.

The sentence is shorter than the 10-year prison term sought by prosecutors against the 65-year-old conservative former leader, whose move against Parliament triggered a major political crisis that ultimately led to his removal from office.

Yoon, a former prosecutor, is still facing seven additional trials. One of them, on charges of insurrection, could potentially result in the death penalty.

On Friday, the Seoul Central District Court ruled on one of the multiple secondary cases linked to the affair, which plunged the country into months of mass protests and political instability.

International

U.S. deportation flight returns venezuelans to Caracas after Maduro’s ouster

A new flight carrying 231 Venezuelans deported from the United States arrived on Friday at the airport serving Caracas, marking the first such arrival since the military operation that ousted and captured President Nicolás Maduro.

On January 3, U.S. forces bombed the Venezuelan capital during an incursion in which Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, were captured. Both are now facing narcotrafficking charges in New York.

This was the first U.S.-flagged aircraft transporting migrants to land in Venezuela since the military action ordered by President Donald Trump, who has stated that he is now in charge of the country.

The aircraft departed from Phoenix, Arizona, and landed at Maiquetía International Airport, which serves the Venezuelan capital, at around 10:30 a.m. local time (14:30 GMT), according to AFP reporters on the ground.

The deportees arrived in Venezuela under a repatriation program that remained in place even during the height of the crisis between the two countries, when Maduro was still in power. U.S. planes carrying undocumented Venezuelan migrants continued to arrive throughout last year, despite the military deployment ordered by Trump.