The return of Luis Inácio Lula da Silva to the Brazilian presidency is seen as a mark of the victory of democratic forces. The January 8 attack on Congress, the Supreme Court, and the executive building reinforced the view that democracy is under attack and that the broad coalition commanded by Lula and his Workers’ Party (PT) is instrumental for the preservation of the democratic regime, built after the long military dictatorship that collapsed in the 1980s. The sociologist and historian of the PT Celso Rocha de Barros has suggested that Lula is Ulysses Guimarães reincarnated, the leader of the opposition to the dictatorship in the 1970s and the political architect of the transition to democracy.¹

Implicit in this notion is the idea that Lula and the PT will be the sacrificial pawns of the democratic movement as much as Guimarães and his party, the Brazilian Democratic Movement (MDB, and later PMDB, with the addition of “Party”), had been in the 1980s. Lula and the PT might help make democracy safe, but doing so will involve making political pacts and adopting economic measures that reduce their political power. Deals with more conservative forces were clear during Lula’s campaign, with the nomination of Geraldo Alckmin, originally from the Brazilian Social Democracy Party (PSDB) and a political rival in the 2006 election, as vice president, and with the backing of Simone Tebet — a representative of agribusiness interests who had been closer to Jair Bolsonaro and the Right than to Lula and the land reform movement — in the runoff campaign, followed by her nomination as cabinet minister.²

In addition, there is a widespread assumption that to maintain this eclectic and fragile coalition Lula must make significant concessions to the center and center-right interests that were instrumental to, and in some cases the main instigators of, the 2016 impeachment process against Dilma Rousseff, Lula’s hand-picked successor in 2010.³ Such concessions would require, in particular, a strong commitment to fiscal responsibility, which would naturally constrain Lula’s ability to expand social spending and redistributive policies. And this is seen as wise, since — the argument goes — it was the very fiscal excesses of previous PT administrations that allowed for the corruption scandals and political crisis that triggered the protests of June 2013 and Dilma Rousseff’s eventual impeachment.