Brazil: Longing for Lula Samantha Pearson Author alerts | Jan 05 22:40 | 4 comments | Share Dilma Rousseff may now be in her second term as Brazil’s president but that has not stopped Brazilians from continuing to obsess over her wildly popular predecessor, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Over the weekend, the Brazilian columnist Leandro Mazzini at the Folha de São Paulo newspaper group sent shockwaves across the country by reporting that Lula has been battling pancreatic cancer since the beginning of 2014. The gruff-voiced former president, who was diagnosed with throat cancer in 2011 and given the all-clear a year later, has vehemently denied the story. Over the past couple of years, speculation that Lula’s cancer has returned has become ever more frequent. It is a scenario that would likely change Brazil’s political future. Lula is expected to run for president in 2018 in a bid to extend the current rule of the Workers’ party (PT) to almost a quarter of a century. Mazzini reports that after getting the all-clear in 2012, Lula discovered he had pancreatic cancer at the beginning of 2014. Since then, he has allegedly been visiting the Sírio-Libanês Hospital in São Paulo in the early hours of the morning for secret treatment. According to the report, he has “controlled” the cancer with a drug from the US similar to Avastin, which shrinks tumors by stopping the formation of new blood vessels. In a statement on Sunday, the PT called the column a “work of fiction”, adding that Lula has been undergoing routine examinations and that doctors did not detect any tumors. In a separate statement, Sírio-Libanês said that Lula had been visiting the hospital for “routine clinical evaluations”. Enraged PT supporters took to Twitter on Monday, accusing the opposition of making up the rumours to weaken the party. “It’s all lies! They’ve lost any sense of decency,” said one, while others called for greater regulation of the media. While the rumour may indeed be false, the frequency with which it crops up in conversations and in the media in Brazil is telling in itself. After all, Rousseff was also struck down by the disease – lymphoma in her case – in 2009 and yet few speculate about whether her cancer has come back or not. On one hand, there is something distinctly Brazilian, or rather Lusophone, about the national obsession with Lula. The former president ruled over one of Brazil’s most impressive economic booms and the country’s arrival on the world stage with its appointment as the host of the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics. While it is natural to yearn for those ‘good old days’, that is especially true in Brazil where ‘saudade’ (a Portuguese word that has no direct translation but roughly means ‘longing’) is considered a national trait – a curious contradiction to Brazilians’ focus on the present. Some trace the characteristic to Sebastianism in Portugal – the belief that King Sebastian, who went missing in battle in the 16th century, would somehow return one day to fulfill Portugal’s great destiny. In the same way, it could be said that many Brazilians long for the return of Lula – their own King Sebastian – to ‘save’ Brazil and make the country great again. On the other hand, the national Lula fixation also says something about the lack of convincing new leadership within the PT, not to mention Rousseff’s failure to win over Brazilians on her own merits during the past four years. Mazzini’s column mentions Dilma’s chief of staff Aloizio Mercadante as a possible 2018 replacement yet he may struggle to garner the necessary support against younger adversaries promising change. While Lula may very well end up running for president in 2018, the furore over the recent rumours shows that the PT at least needs to start working on a better Plan B.
Posted on: Tue, 06 Jan 2015 21:09:05 +0000
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