Brazil has its first left-wing president for eight years after the swearing in of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, in a ceremony witnessed by tens of thousands of the veteran leader’s supporters.
At least 17 heads of state attended the event in Brasilia yesterday, including the presidents of Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Germany and Portugal, as well as King Felipe of Spain.
After being named as the republic’s new head of state, Lula, as he is known in Brazil, did not waste any time in criticising his predecessor, the conservative Jair Bolsonaro. “On these terrible ruins I make the commitment, together with the Brazilian people, to rebuild the country and make a Brazil of all and for all again,” he said in his inaugural speech, during which he often appeared overcome with emotion.
Bolsonaro, 67, his predecessor who never formally conceded defeat after a close-run vote in October, took no part in the ceremony. He left the country for the United States on Friday.
Posting a farewell video on his social media accounts, the former leader pledged that “battles are lost, but we will not lose the war”. He and members of his family were seen on Saturday in Orlando, Florida.
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In a sign of the division he left in the country there was an early security alert just before the main ceremony began when police detained a man with an explosive device and a knife who was trying to enter the cordoned-off main thoroughfare in the capital.
Lula, 77, was driven to the inauguration ceremony in the republic’s open-top state car, a 1952 Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith. Along the way he was cheered by supporters, some of them holding placards reading “Daddy comes home”. The former union leader previously served as president for consecutive terms from 2003 to 2011.
He walked up a red-carpeted ramp to the magnificent Planalto presidential palace, accompanied by his wife Rosângela “Janja” da Silva, and a group deliberately selected for its diversity that included Chief Raoni Metuktire of the Kayapó tribe, a young black boy and a disabled man.
Traditionally, an outgoing Brazilian head of state hands the presidential sash to his or her successor. As Bolsonaro had absented himself, that role was performed by Aline Sousa, a rubbish collector.
“This is like a restoration of happiness and it puts Brazil back on the map again,” Nicolas Nascimento, 23, a lawyer in the crowd, told The Times.
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Yasmin Batista, 19, a student, said: “I am glad to see the end of the previous fascist government.”
Supporters of Lula were wearing the red colours of his Workers’ Party. Some had continued celebrating from New Year’s Eve parties the night before.
As night fell over the 1950s modernist capital city the festivities continued with a massive evening concert featuring some of the country’s music and samba stars. Called the “Lulapalooza”, it was organised by Da Silva, 56, whom the twice-widowed leader married last year.
The Lula team have portrayed the Bolsonaro era as an aberration in the country’s democratic history, and a theme of events in the capital yesterday was that Brazil was being reborn.
However, in another stark reminder of just how polarised the country still is, a crowd of Bolsonaro’s diehard supporters, many draped in the Brazilian flag, spent yesterday camped outside the city’s army headquarters, as they have for the past two months, calling for the military to void the result of the election. They jeered that Lula was a “thief” and a “communist”.
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“Democracy was the great victor in this election, overcoming . . . the most violent threats to freedom to vote, and the most abject campaign of lies and hate plotted to manipulate and embarrass the electorate,” Lula told congress in his inaugural speech.
“Those who erred will answer for their errors,” he said, an apparent threat of legal action against Bolsonaro.
Last week police arrested a man who allegedly intended to set off a bomb close to the main Brasilia airport to “sow chaos”. Yesterday about 10,000 police officers were guarding the event. Some carried weapons designed to bring down drones.
Bolsonaro’s vice-president, Hamilton Mourão, has distanced himself from what some have portrayed as the extended sulk of the outgoing leader. “An alternation of power is healthy in a democracy and must be upheld,” he said in a televised address on Saturday.
The ceremony was held precisely 20 years after the new president, who grew up in extreme poverty in northeast Brazil, first took office in 2003. His two terms in power in the early 2000s coincided with a historic commodities boom, largely driven by Chinese demand, which in turn led to his popularity surging as he used the windfall to help lift tens of millions of people out poverty.
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He was succeeed in 2011 by his protégé, Dilma Rousseff, but his downfall came when he was caught up in an investigation into kickbacks paid to politicians in return for state contracts. Tried and found guilty of corruption, he spent 18 months in jail before being released in 2019, when the sentence was annulled, partly on the basis that he was tried in the wrong jurisdiction.
Analysts suggest he faces far more complicated circumstances now than when he first ran the country. “In 2003 the ceremony was very beautiful. There wasn’t this bad, heavy climate,” Carlos Melo, a political science professor at Insper university in Sao Paulo, said. “Today, it’s a climate of terror.”
Lula has said he will only serve a single four-year term and that his priorities will be fighting poverty and investing in education and health. He indicated earlier that he would take a zero-tolerance approach towards illegal deforestation of the Amazon, which surged under Bolsonaro. “Brazil does not need to deforest to maintain and expand its strategic agricultural frontier,” he said yesterday.
