Africa-Press – Lesotho. Pic – CNN Brazil’s recent political history has been eventful, with a military rule last century until mass demonstrations led by trade union leader Lula da Silva, forced the installation of a form of presidential democracy and ultimately paved the way for leftist President Lula’s two terms from 2003 to 2010 after several attempts to win the presidency in the nineties.
Lula was the first Brazilian president to come from a worker background, a mass movement organiser with no formal high education, a sort of predecessor across the oceans to his equally successful counterpart in BRICS, Narendra Modi, the former tea-seller with great organisational skills and political acumen.
While there was this visible social and economic progress under President Lula, with massive declines in absolute and relative poverty as per the World Bank, there were also allegations of corruption that brought down Lula and plagued him in later years.
Lula was succeeded as President of Brazil by his Chief of Staff Dilma Rousseff. During Rousseff’s second tenure, a corruption scandal enveloped her government, herself and Lula’s Workers Party.
Later in 2016, Lula himself was dragged into it and within a year, he, his wife, and six others were facing six corruption cases. In 2017, Lula was convicted and was sentenced to 10 years in jail. Lula walked out of prison in 2019 and his sentence was annulled by the Supreme Court of Brazil in 2021, paving the way for his political comeback.
In the October 2022 presidential elections, President Lula narrowly won by a margin of only 2% and was intronised on 1 Jan 2023, while the far-right conservative party of his opponent Jair Bolsonaro won and controls both Houses of Parliament.
Bolsonaro was widely attacked for Amazon rainforest deforestation to benefit American cattle and beef agro-business, a massively corrupt and incompetent handling of the Covid pandemic and a slide into authoritarianism (repression of the press and clamp down on civic freedoms).
He refused to concede election results, fled to Florida from where he floated a Trump copycat load of conspiracy theories, even fomenting an equally failed Jan 8th riot in the Brazilian capital.
For More News And Analysis About Lesotho Follow Africa-Press
