The right leftist

FOUR YEARS AGO, BRAZILIAN President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva looked like just another domino in Latin and South America’s leftward tumble, an echo of Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez in the continent’s largest country. Wall Street and Washington watched his inauguration with trepidation, the sea of red Workers’ Party flags in Brasilia echoing the likely returns on their investments and the spread of anti-Americanism.

How quickly power transforms a firebrand. The many degrees of separation between Lula and Chavez disprove the notion of a monolithic left. Brazil’s president is respectful of democratic norms, and he has managed to walk the fine line between business interests and those of the working poor. That’s why the prospect of his resounding reelection just over a month away (in the most recent poll Lula had about a 25-point lead) is greeted by policy wonks and fund managers in this country with a collective shrug.

Lula may have disappointed his more radical followers when he embraced orthodox macroeconomic policies, but the results have been strong job growth, a stable currency and low inflation coupled with dramatic increases in the minimum wage and a sweeping poverty reduction program. The program, Bolsa Familia, has been so successful that the World Bank has been trumpeting it as a model for the rest of the world. Although Lula has conducted his foreign policy quietly, letting Chavez’s flamboyant fire-breathing steal headlines, he has become a voice for the world’s poor, helping lead the charge to reduce agricultural subsidies in the United States and the European Union in the Doha round of trade talks.

The paradox is that, unlike Chavez -- a military man who tried taking power in an unsuccessful coup before finding democracy -- Lula was a longtime, bona fide leftist labor activist, persecuted by the military for his democratic activism as leader of one of Brazil’s biggest unions and founder of the Workers’ Party. The socialist president of Chile, Michelle Bachelet, is another former activist turned pragmatic president who defies the stereotype of the Latin American left.

That’s not to say Lula has been perfect. His first term was mired by a corruption scandal that nearly doomed his presidency. And he may have been too deferential to the likes of Chavez at times, partly to placate his own base and partly because of Brazil’s political culture of compromise. Brazil is home to half of South America’s population and should have commensurate influence on the continent. If reelected, it would be nice to see Lula steal some of those headlines from his Venezuelan counterpart.