President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva said this Saturday (18) that the right took over the “anti-system” place in politics because the left was content with winning elections and managing neoliberalism, practicing austerity and giving up public policies in the name of governability.
“We have been the managers of the evil of neoliberalism,” said the president, in a speech at the Global Progressive Mobilization (GPM), a left-wing event, in Barcelona, Spain. “We have become the system. So it is not surprising that the other side now presents itself as anti-system.”
According to the president, the extreme right knew how to capitalize on the “bad state of the unfulfilled promises of neoliberalism” and channeled the population’s frustrations, while left-wing governments gave up on their programs.
Lula defended that left-wing parties need to practice coherence and implement the programs with which they were elected. In his assessment, a good part of the people, although they do not identify themselves as progressive, are in agreement with agendas associated with the left.
“She wants to eat well, live well, a quality school, a quality hospital, a serious and responsible climate policy, a very tough environmental policy, she wants a clean and healthy world, a decent job, with a balanced working day, a salary that allows for a comfortable life”, he listed.
The Brazilian president also defended that the role of the left is to “point the finger at the real culprits” for the population’s frustrations, which would be the billionaires who support the majority of the world’s wealth, and not the LGBT+ population or immigrants.
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“This fight needs to be global, there is no point in keeping the house in order in a world in disorder,” he said. “Warlords drop bombs on women and children, spend billions of dollars on weapons that could be used to end hunger, solve the energy problem, the health problem.”
