csillagkohó’s Reviews > Lula: A People's President and the Fight for Brazil's Future > Status Update

"The fact that Bolsonaro's calamitous handling of COVID-19 eroded so much of his political standing demonstrates that a basic level of competency and empathy is still seen as a key quality in elected leaders."

"This remains the clearest way of understanding Dilma's ouster: various conservative forces came together to find a way to remove the PT from power after failing time and again to do so at the ballot box." Instead of improving faith in democracy, the 2016 "soft coup" swiftly "emboldened a darkly reactionary current that openly questioned whether democracy is worth preserving if the PT were to keep winning elections."

"Lula's critics have often dismissed his successes as the result of luck. Good fortine was certainly part of the equation, but it does not account for the burst of creative new policies that were implemented under his watch. In terms of democratic governments delivering material gains to the majority of the population, Lula's first two terms represent an apotheosis in modern Brazilian history."

In the 1988 Constitutional Assembly there was somehow a considerable strand of people who wanted Brazil to go back to being a monarchy: "Monarchists argued that a king would guarantee the political stability and sobriety the country sorely lacked."

"Lula argued in the 1970s that the challenges facing workers began not with the 1964 coup but with the 1930 Revolution that brought Vargas to power: 'Trade unionism in Brazil was born wrong, upside down.' ... Lula was calling out a generation of labor leaders who prioritized maintaining friendly relationships with management or political elites over advocating for the rights and interests of their members."