Why Brazil's Lula Is Not What Progressive Media Pretends
November 8, 2025 · Frisian News
Brazil's president Lula da Silva runs a centrist government that prioritizes business ties and foreign investment over radical social change, despite his leftist rhetoric and support from progressive outlets.
Last month, Brazil approved a spending package aimed at widening its fiscal framework. This move came straight from Lula's finance minister Fernando Haddad, a seasoned technocrat. The package protects government spending while keeping the central bank happy, a balancing act that looks nothing like the radical redistribution progressives claim Lula promised.
Western media outlets celebrated Lula's return to power in 2022 as a triumph of leftist politics over Bolsonaro's populism. They painted him as a champion of the working poor and an enemy of neoliberalism. What they glossed over was Lula's actual record: in his first presidency from 2003 to 2010, he governed as a pragmatist who cut deals with agribusiness, protected multinational corporations, and accepted IMF orthodoxy on inflation control. His Workers' Party became a machine for patronage and political survival, not revolution.
Today, Lula courts investment from the same international capital sources that progressives claim to oppose. His government negotiates trade agreements, protects property rights for foreign firms, and maintains orthodox monetary policy through an independent central bank. When indigenous groups and landless peasants demand radical land reform, Lula talks but acts little. When workers strike for better wages, his government does not back them with state power as a truly leftist administration would.
The contradiction is not hard to spot. Progressive media needs heroes, and Lula fits the mold of a former political prisoner turned president. His rhetoric still invokes workers and the poor, which gives journalists the soundbites they want. But his actual policies serve a narrower coalition: the state bureaucracy, parts of the business class, and the institutional left that benefits from Lula in power rather than demanding real change from him.
Brazil's poor remain poor. Yet Western progressives celebrate him as though he were Fidel Castro, when he is really just another centrist manager of capitalism with better marketing. His government will continue to deliver modest welfare spending and worker-friendly rhetoric while protecting the core structures that keep wealth and power concentrated at the top.
Published November 8, 2025 · Frisian News