Lula stops the Trumpist wave in South America

BarcelonaBeyond the internal effects for Brazil, Lula da Silva's unexpected victory in this Sunday's presidential elections has a major global impact, as it represents the first defeat of the reactionary wave driven by Trumpism in South America. Indeed, for Washington, Brazil was the big game piece on the continent after having achieved victories in Argentina with Javier Milei, in Chile with José Antonio Kast, in Colombia with Abelardo de la Espriella, and in Peru with Keiko Fujimori. The veteran Brazilian leader has achieved not only a historic comeback (never had a candidate who lost in the first round won before), but has broken a trend that seemed unstoppable.

The internal situation in Brazil will continue to be delicate because the far-right controls the legislative chambers and because Trump will maintain what is known in Portuguese as tarifaço (a 25% general tariff on exports to the United States), but there is no doubt that Lula's victory is also, as the European Union has pointed out, the victory of multilateralism and a vision of the world not based on spheres of influence but on cooperation and trade agreements. In fact, on May 1st, the agreement between the EU and Mercosur came into force, of which Lula has been one of the main drivers.

For the moment, Jair Bolsonaro has refused to recognize the election result and a violent reaction by his followers cannot be ruled out. But the truth is that the result has been overwhelming: four and a half million votes of difference between the candidate of the Workers' Party (PT) and that of the Liberal Party (PL). Furthermore, Lula has managed to improve his results compared to four years ago: he has gone from 50.90% to 51.79%, while Jair Bolsonaro has fallen compared to his own results, having obtained 49.10% of the votes in 2022: now he has remained at 48.21%. Brazil, however, continues to be a strongly divided country, between a northeast and urban areas more clearly Lula-leaning and an interior and a south that are Bolsonarists. The defense of public services and pensions, as well as a nationalist discourse against the interference of the United States and the magnates who control social networks, have been the keys that explain the result.

Now it will be necessary to see if Lula's victory is an isolated event or represents a global trend change, since this weekend a right-wing populist leader like Aleksandar Vucic was also defeated in Serbia, just as Viktor Orbán was defeated before in Hungary. This Tuesday, elections are being held in Israel that may also have a strong regional and global impact, but the big event of the year is the midterm elections in the United States on November 3rd, which may mark the beginning of the end of Trumpism. It is curious that it has been a politician who is about to turn 81 years old, and who is surely the most important figure in South American politics of the last decades, who has inflicted this defeat on another octogenarian like Trump, who sees his dream of controlling the entire continent fade away.