Sublime

When I interviewed him in 2006, Lula da Silva talked a lot about this combination of economic stability and trade growth. He had grown up on a farm in rural Pernambuco in the north-east, and in the early 1950s made the long trip to São Paulo with his mother and brothers on the back of a lorry. During his teens, Lula had sold oranges and peanuts at

There was torrential rain in Brasília when Dilma Rousseff was inaugurated as president on 1 January 2011. But the mood in Brazil’s capital was upbeat, as the country’s first ever woman president arrived at the National Congress building in a 1952 Rolls Royce Silver Wraith with her daughter Paula next to her and an all-female security detail jogging

Critics would claim that Lula had been lucky. During the 1990s his party had opposed both the Real Plan and the subsequent rounds of fiscal austerity that had eventually vanquished inflation. The trade boom – from which his government benefited – was mainly a result of China’s own growth and opening to world markets, and the neat fit between this a

Once elected, Lula backed up his commitment to stability by appointing Henrique Meirelles, a banker who had contested the election as a candidate for a senatorial seat for Cardoso’s PSDB party, to the central bank. The incoming finance minister, Antônio Palocci, appointed a series of ‘market-friendly’ technocrats to advise him. Palocci had been a T

On the international stage, Lula is best-known for his Bolsa Familia (family grant) social programme. Like his famed economic stabilisation policies, the grant was initiated by his main…

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In retrospect, it seems obvious that the foundations of Brazil’s transformation were too fragile for these positive changes to be sustained. At the time, though, it didn’t seem so evident. By the time Lula left office in 2010, Brazil was a very different country to the one that had emerged from military dictatorship in 1985. Three fundamental econo