Brazil’s first working-class president got a hero’s welcome at the World Social Forum, wowing 10,000 leftists with a vow to reproach the rich and famous for causing the global meltdown when he meets with them this week.
Former radical union leader Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva — known almost everywhere as Lula — was greeted on Tuesday night like a rock star by activists in a sports stadium chanting “Lula, Lula, the warrior of the Brazilian people!”
And he got more cheers after promising to scold world leaders and bankers at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland — and tell them the free market policies they have espoused for decades were to blame for the global financial crunch.
PHOTO: AFP
“The financial system can’t parade itself as a good example, because it ended up provoking the biggest crisis in recent years,” he said.
Lula said the Davos gathering doesn’t have as much glamor as it did when he first attended it just after his inauguration in 2003.
Now, he said, developing nations like Brazil only recently viewed as second-class countries will have a strong hand in setting a new world economic order.
As a storied leftist union leader, Lula was a popular fixture at the World Social Forum — started in Porto Alegre a decade ago as a counterpoint to the yearly gathering of the business and political elite at the World Economic Forum — although he has grated on some activists since being elected Brazil’s president.
Lula turned to the center after taking office and embraced free market economic policies loathed by the forum’s leftists, but he also spent heavily on social programs that have lifted millions of Brazilians out of poverty. Brazil is also riding an unprecedented economic boom.
Lula was booed at the social forum in 2005 by activists who felt he had betrayed his leftist roots and were more impressed with the presence of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, a strident socialist.
But Chavez didn’t show up at the social forum this year, and Brazilians attending the event said Lula should get most of the credit for Brazil’s rapid advance on the world stage during his administration and for extremely strong economic advances that have helped most of the nation’s more than 190 million citizens.
Brazil was also among the last nations to be hit by the financial crisis and among the first to emerge with strong growth prospects based on heavy domestic consumer demand.
“He’s made friends for Brazil with all of the countries in the world, and he’s created harmony for the rich and poor,” said Noe Melo Hernandez, a retired police officer. “It’s really remarkable.”
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