The daily Jornal do Brasil, in a similar article, stated, "Blunders, localized incompetence, festivals of insensitivity or simple slips and gaffes have lowered the ratings of some sectors of the government."
Da Silva has recently been promising that this year will be the year in which Brazil once again experiences "the spectacle of growth." Municipal elections are scheduled for October, and opposition leaders, seeking to turn the vote into a referendum on the national government, have warned that da Silva's embrace of their political program will not be enough to gain their support.
"This government is going to have to be weaned now," the minority leader in the Senate, Artur Virgilio, said just before Christmas. "This year we gave them a lot of sustenance, but now they are going to have to learn to walk on their own instead of being carried around in our lap."
In one area, at least, da Silva has been as good as his word: foreign relations. Though he criticized his predecessor, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, for spending too much time away from Brazil, da Silva has traveled abroad even more. He has been lobbying for a permanent seat on the UN Security Council for Brazil and pursuing a nationalist foreign policy.
With little to show on the domestic front, da Silva has been able to placate the left wing of his party by organizing a group of major developing nations to stand up to the US and the EU in global trade talks. But some of his other initiatives have been faulted as unnecessarily provocative, like a recent Middle East trip on which he visited Libya, where he described its dictator, Colonel Muammar Qaddafi as a good friend, and Syria, where he called on the US to withdraw from Iraq, but skipped Israel and Saudi Arabia.
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