US right wing calls for tanks to be sent to Brazil, Lenin’s Tomb dream for Lula and Putin’s soft power win in Valdai
“It’s time for action. Send in the tanks,” tweeted the New York Young Republican Club as the results of Brazil’s nail-biting presidential runoff made it clear that it was the end of the road for incumbent Jair Bolsonaro, whose masterful disinformation peddling has often made him a hero of this newsletter. Bolsonaro has spent the last several months mimicking Donald Trump’s Big Lie, baselessly attacking the integrity of Brazil’s electronic voting system and suggesting the election was rigged against him. Ahead of the vote, election fraud conspiracies took over social media in Brazil, with some Bolsonaro supporters openly plotting a January 6-style coup if he lost. Now that he has, the question hanging over the country is whether he will concede defeat. Steve Bannon is telling him not to. As of this newsletter’s publication, Bolsonaro’s normally noisy Twitter account has been eerily quiet.
And just like that, after four years of Bolsonaro’s far-right rule, Brazil swung all the way left again as 77-year-old Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, a former factory worker, made an astonishing political comeback almost twenty years after he was first elected as president in 2003. At home, Lula promises to reunite the country. But when it comes to global politics, his rhetoric reminds me of…none other than Vladimir Putin. Fun Fact: when Lula traveled to Moscow as president in 2005, he told Russian media that he had “fulfilled his lifelong dream” of visiting Lenin’s tomb. Just like his Russian counterpart, Lula is a major advocate for a multipolar world and it is safe to bet that Russia will milk Lula’s stance on Ukraine. In an interview with Time magazine in May, Lula blamed NATO expansion for Russia’s invasion and said that “Zelensky wanted the war, and is now playing a role in a play.”
PUTIN’S VALDAI SPEECH WIN
Lula and his supporters are exactly the audience that Putin would have been hoping to appeal to when he spoke last week, at length and with passion, about multipolarism and the need to end Western hegemony at the annual meeting of the Valdai Discussion Club, Russia’s answer to Davos.
In theory, a multipolar world is, of course, a wonderful thing. As I watched Putin’s speech and the Q&A that followed, I was struck by just how attractive the Russian leader’s rhetoric would be if you were listening to it in a vacuum.