The LatinNews Podcast

Transcript

• Show Transcript

  Richard McColl: This is The LatinNews Podcast. I'm your host, Richard McColl, here in Bogotá, Colombia. This week's episode is all about the elections in Brazil, and I'm speaking to André Pagliarini, who is the assistant professor at the Department of History at Louisiana State University (LSU). It is an absolute pleasure because you are the author of Lula: A People's President and the Fight for Brazil's Future, as well as Claiming the Nation: The Politics of Nationalism in Modern Brazil.

  André Pagliarini: Thank you for the invitation, Richard. It's a pleasure to be speaking with you.

  Richard McColl: So we need to get into the crux of things. Now, a lot's been made of this, obviously, of this incredible victory by Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in the second round of elections, defying, I would say, the right-wing shift and the anti-incumbent movement in Latin America at the moment.

  But let's talk about let's go quickly right into it. What happened on election night?

  André Pagliarini: In hindsight, the challenge of overcoming the difference from the first round in which Flávio Bolsonaro beat Lula by about two percentage points, 47% to 45% in hindsight, it should not have seemed perhaps as daunting as it was because the number of people who didn't turn out to vote in the first round far exceeded the difference between the two candidates.

  So the challenge the Lula campaign faced was not necessarily to convince Flávio Bolsonaro's voters not to vote for him. It was to galvanize the people who didn't show up in the first place, and what we saw as being key to the turnaround was precisely that, was getting the people who maybe thought that Lula had it in the bag and, or maybe thought that Flávio didn't have it in him to win the first round because again, the polls in the first round indicated Lula would probably win in the first round.

  There would be a runoff, but Lula would be ahead. When that didn't happen, I think it galvanized maybe soft Lula supporters who didn't show up to say, "Oh, I bet- I better turn up for the runoff." So what we saw on election night this pa- on the second round on October 25th was that, was Lula more than making up the difference between him and Flávio in, in the first round by reducing dramatically the number of abstentions.

  It was the smallest abstention rate in the runoff in 20 years. So that was the key to victory, and they pulled it off.

  Richard McColl: They really did. He won by 4.4 million votes, but you said he... How did he manage to galvanize and get people out to vote? How did he get these sort of soft voters out there?

  Because he wasn't, he obviously wasn't pulling votes in from the other the, the other candidates. They were all on the right. They weren't going to go to Lula. So what happened?

  André Pagliarini: It's a two-part story. One is the online organizing that the campaign was much better at in the second round, but also real world engagement from people who I think we, we should understand as being freaked out, as terrified by the prospect of a Flávio return.

  Even it in the night of the first round when much of Lula's coalition was incredibly dispirited and dis- it looked like the writing was on the wall, Flávio was gonna trounce, d- wa- waltz to victory in the second round, Lula said something, which is, "We have to have a completely new campaign.

  We have to... That campaign is over. This is a completely new campaign." And I'm not sure a lot of people really thought that was plausible. Yeah, sure, what does that even mean, but what he meant was we need to completely rejigger, reimagine our online presence, and he did this by bringing to the center of the campaign, first of all, those small bright spots for his party in the first round of the campaign, people who had won election in the first round.

  Flávio's allies did really well across the country. So he called people who had done well on his side to help with messaging, to help with strategizing, including by bringing in André Janones to help coordinate his social media presence. And that, that's one of the things that a lot of international outlets are covering was- Yeah

  this WhatsApp group that reached 11 million people in the on the during the runoff, known as the Exército de Lula's Army, overseen by this congressman, André Janones, who did something unprecedented in Brazilian election Brazilian elections, which was to combine the sort of day-to-day conversations that millions of Brazilian people have on WhatsApp.

  It's one of the largest users of WhatsApp in the world- To embed within that political organizing, marching orders every day. Today we're gonna do this, everyone's gonna do it, and it reached a scale that helped reach people that were otherwise not engaged in the campaign. That's one of the ways that they reduced the abstention rate.

  The other element of the story were these massive urban rallies, some of the biggest in a Brazilian campaign since the return of democracy, that in part were organized online, but even before that WhatsApp group reached the, the heights that it did, people, students in particular in Niterói, in the state of Rio, for example, were spontaneously, organically taking to the streets to signal their repudiation of Bolsonaro.

  We do not want another Bolsonaro coming back. And that, I think, helped shake things up. The way I would describe it the last point I'll make on this is I think the fact that Flávio beat the odds to come out ahead in the first round suddenly made him the incumbent, effectively, for the runoff.

  And he was on the defensive against, this, this large part of the electorate that said, "Oh, we have to take this prospect seriously." And so I think that was a very healthy thing for the Lula campaign to all of a sudden treat the challenger as the incumbent and put the onus on him to defend his vision for Brazil.

  And I think Flávio got a little bit ahead of himself. They were talking already about cabinet members and things like this that I think rubbed many voters the wrong way. That is a, a fascinating way of looking at it, flipping it on its head entirely. Flávio being the incumbent because of the first round victory.

  Richard McColl: Of course it could've been so different. It could've been so different, but this real world engagement of which you speak, it made people feel as if they h- they had a definite participation, a real role to play. This, this real world engagement of which you speak, it gave people a sense of participation and of course this very slick social media campaign.

  And I'll bring it down to the Colombia because we are, we do talk about the region. Of course we talk about the region and the way that, that so many elections, the majority, have swung to the right. (Abelardo) de la Espriella in Colombia had a very slick social media campaign, whereas the progressive left under Iván Cepeda had almost zero.

  The Lula campaign saw this. They took a leaf out of this book and said, "We cannot be in this situation such as in Colombia." Would you say so?

  André Pagliarini: That's right. Brazilian campaigns particularly I would say the Workers' Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores, PT), the left, have been for years now, and for years they have recognized this as a problem but have done little to address it, rooted very much in the 20th century.

  Primarily campaigns in the real world involve flyers, posters, flags, things like this. Fernando Haddad, who was Lula's finance minister, who lost his race for governor of São Paulo in the first round, I remember there was a lot of infighting, stories about infighting in the press, and one of the things that people behind the scenes were fighting about was deliveries of posters.

  And I'm thinking, "Seriously, this is what we're arguing about is posters and handouts?" What we saw in the runoff was a recognition to say look, that stuff might matter at the margins, but where the political fights in the 21st century are happening are on these networks, the algorithm, social media.

  And that's one of the things that Janones, André Janones the man responsible for the, for this group, it's not that he diagnosed a problem nobody else had. I think most in the PT- ... sensed that. What he offered was a diagnosis and a plan. Like this is how- ... this is how you do it, A, B, and C.

  And it has been so successful that he is already being courted and invited by Pedro Sánchez in Spain, by leftists in France and Mexico because I think a lot of people, and the Colombian case was a recent counter example of what not to do. Many political forces, particularly progressives, are scratching their heads about how you go up against reactionary political forces that are backed by the scale of power essentially in our daily lives that big tech wields.

  Richard McColl: Let's talk about the campaign a little bit, and let's talk about these new policies that Lula obviously discussed in the in, in between the first round and the second round. The change in the labor law, the betting, the prohibition of betting platforms, and of course we've done the so- social media.

  But how... Did this as well mobilize people or were they was he throwing anything out there and trying to make it stick as well?

  André Pagliarini: So that too I might say a little bit of the latter, because this is a traditional play in campaigns, and I think the campaign, it was quite, in the first round, quite staid, quite traditional, quite safe, assuming that incumbency would lift Lula in the end.

  And so they did the traditional thing that, that an incumbent does in Brazil in an election year, which is, as you say, lots of new programs, maybe increasing the amount of Bolsa Família, this conditional cash transfer program, the hope being that over the course of the campaign, this would steadily increase Lula's approval numbers.

  The problem was that didn't happen. They did all these things. They promised all this money for new programs, and we got to the first round, and it had very little effect translating to votes. The second round, though they did not abandon that part of the playbook, as you said, particularly the the what's called the escala seis por um which is the six to one, six working days to one day off that has been the norm in Brazil for, for was done away with in favor of a five to two, which is five working days, two days off a 44-week- 44-hour workweek to a 42-hour workweek.

  In the context of what we were discussing earlier of a dynamic online campaign, the m- this move of the government doing things in a campaign to try to appeal to people, that hadn't really had an effect. But in the context we were just discussing of a dynamic, re-energized digital presence, I think that helped.

  And so it, then that message was supercharged in a way that had fallen flat before. So these things, old school and new school campaign styles worked in the second round together to amplify each other, whereas in the first round it had largely fallen short.

  Richard McColl: I... This is really interesting that the old and the new could come together in this fashion and actually benefit one another. Let's talk about the opposition at this moment in time. Flávio Bolsonaro, obviously passports were canceled, but he managed to get across into Argentina.

  We know now that he's in Miami after fleeing via Ecuador. Is this... Does this erode the supremacy of the Bolsonaro clan as, the figure on the right now? Are we looking at someone like, Tarcísio de Freitas taking over? What can we see is gonna happen to the Bolsonaros?

  André Pagliarini: I think the biggest loser in the presidential campaign is the Bolsonaro family itself because their camp, their broader ideological movement, as we said earlier, did quite well.

  Allies sweeping to power across the country, in many cases in the first round winning governorships in many places around the country, setting up a next generation of, like-minded political forces. But the family itself, I think has now lost the argument, even before Flávio chose to flee- has lost the argument that if the family itself is indispensable. That was one of the arguments in selecting Flávio to run in the first place. Many argued at the time on the right that, wouldn't it be better if we selected someone who represents the right but doesn't necessarily carry the baggage of this tarnished last name, that- Jair Bolsonaro, the former president now serving a lengthy prison sentence for attempting a coup, many people love him, but many more people would not vote for him because of what he tried to do. So what if we ran someone who might like conservative politics but is turned off by the name? And so Tarcísio de Freitas, who you mentioned, the governor of São Paulo, was at one point considered the l- the most likely candidate of the right-wing camp.

  But Jair Bolsonaro from his, from prison insisted on his son running. Now, in hindsight, looking at this from the moment of defeat, I think Jair Bolsonaro and Flávio Bolsonaro have largely discredited them- themselves as movement leaders. And I... What the cherry on, on, on that cake is the decision to flee because I think- Yeah

  The fact that he is now supposedly going to try to organize the opposition from abroad, from the United States, even their allies in the right-wing camp, I think will not look upon that well. They might talk about it in certain ways, but it's hard to imagine they will accept taking direction from Florida,

  Richard McColl: what, w- why is it, was it pure vanity by Jaír to say, "No, it has to be Flávio that runs it. It has to be him as the figure"? Or is it a continuity of the surname maybe, that recognition factor for the right?

  André Pagliarini: Yeah, I think one way of reading it is that he thought, "I am the only person to have defeated the PT at the ballot box, at least since Lula's first victory in 2002."

  That's, we shouldn't take for granted my personal appeal, he might say, as Jair Bolsonaro, this rough and tumble character, and the best way to incarnate that is not by a cabinet minister or some... it's a direct, someone directly connected to me, my, my, my son. I think that's the most generous argument of the logic behind it, was to say, "I did something no one else had done.

  My son is best positioned to replicate me as a political force." But I do think there is also a sense that Jair Bolsonaro chafed at the apparent imposition by his allies of people who were polling better. Again, Tarcísio de Freitas, Ronaldo Caiado, the governor of Goiás, Romeu Zema, the governor of Minas Gerais, many of them polled competitively with Lula at the start of this year.

  Many of them were jockeying for position to try to be the chosen candidate. But I think there was a  there's, there is a certain allergy on the part of Jair Bolsonaro to be told, "Hey, we're gonna do this." And so once it became clear that his party might prefer a different candidate, I think he doubled down even more in what was ultimately not a good bet, of course.

  Ultimately not. In fact considering where Flávio is today, it's worth remembering a report that the head of their party, the Liberal Party (Partido Liberal, PL), told Flávio at the start of the campaign when they were still debating this, he said, "Flávio, you realize if you run and lose, you will not have parliamentary immunity because you are not running for Senate.

  You will have lost your Senate seat. You need to be prepared for that reality. If you lose, you are no longer immune to inquiries." As a way I think of telling Flávio, "Do you really wanna run this risk?" And things have played out the way they have, and Flávio now having lost his immunity, or at least he would lose it in February has decided to escape potential investigation in Brazil.

  Richard McColl: Ah. So let's if we talk about the government and the situation that Lula now, will be taking on, it's like the Senate has a conservative majority and of course there'll be the desire to impeach Supreme Court judges. But also it's... Do you think that Lula will then, he's going to shift a little bit and maybe include some moderate or democratic sectors of the right in his administration?

  André Pagliarini: I think he certainly will do that, yes. He he did it in, in, in 2022 after he won there also, which was to include centrist sectors of largely center-right party, parties into his cabinet. Figures from the Brazilian Democratic Movement (Movimento Democrático Brasileiro, MDB), from the Social Democratic Party (Partido Social Democrático, PSD), parties that, have aligned in the States sometimes with the right, sometimes with the left, these kind of centrist parties that do their own thing and are most concerned with their own power.

  He will certainly continue that and perhaps even expand it in, in the second term. That said I really think the best anyone can expect from this next term, as exciting as many people might be by the result of this second round, is That of a largely caretaker government. I don't think there will be many substantive achievements in either house of Congress.

  As you said, the Senate is largely controlled by the right, as is Congress. The Lula's party is the second largest in the lower house, but it's quite a gap from them to the, the PL, the Bolsonaro party at the top. But that's, that sounds like small bore, but it's no small thing because I think the fact that Lula will be president will, if you like, keep the barbarians at bay for four years to allow the left to reorganize itself, because they need to prepare for the post-Lula moment.

  So if I had to imagine where we're going in the next several months with the Lula government, f- relatively few major policy wins, but a clear attempt to empower new, younger forces within his broad ideological camp to begin getting a sense of where future leaders might emerge from. I think that's really the project of the fourth term is to prepare the democratic, small D democratic progressive camp for facing this entrenched right once Lula leaves the stage.

  Richard McColl: So y- these, these progressives, this left, they can't lower their guard at all then, as you say- Exactly ... a caretaker government. The, a lot is being made of who could be the successor or the heir to this, fourth term of Lula, now 81 years old. And I've been seeing names like Flávio Dino, Rafael Fonteles, Guilherme Boulos, Geraldo Alckmin, even Fernando Haddad and Camilo Santana.

  What do what do you think about any of these, these possibles?

  André Pagliarini: I can imagine two different lanes when thinking about the, the succession question. One is the lane that says, in the face of a far-right opposition, we sh- we, the left, should return to our combative anti-establishment roots. The st- the identity that made Lula a mass national leader in the first place, that kind of combative insurgent energy.

  Someone like Guilherme Boulos represents that. Someone like Erika Hilton, who is I think she beat the record. I think she was the most voted Congresswoman in the state of São Paulo. She's a trans woman, young, dynamic very good on social media and all this. In fact, she was the, the one most responsible for that reduction of the work week measure.

  It's often associated with her efforts in Congress. So that is one lane combative, the other lane is, I think, institutional, moderate. It's the sort of institutional face of Lula, the person who works within, works with Congress, works piecemeal, little by little- ... progress moving forward steadily.

  Someone up until this election, I think Fernando Haddad, his finance minister, former education minister, former mayor of São Paulo, was in many ways the presumed heir. The problem for Haddad is that h- now having lost the governor's race, he has lost three elections in a row, twice for governor and then re-election in for mayor.

  He might be burned politically after so many losses, although we'll see. Other figures you me- you mentioned Camilo Santana, the former governor of Ceará, who came out greatly empowered in this race. Rafael Fonteles, the young governor of Piauí. He's the one most people seem excited about. What- whichever lane the w- we end up, the party ends up going, what I do think will happen is a reorientation of the party's center of gravity away from the southeast, where the PT was born, São Paulo specifically, to the northeast, which has become, over the past 20 years, Lula's political firewall.

  Richard McColl: The thing that delivers Lula the presidency time and again is his overwhelming favoritism in the northeast, which of course is where he was born. So I think we don't exactly know tone or style where the party's gonna go, where the left is going to go, but I think in regional terms, it's probably going to look more and more northeastern than southeastern.

  André Pagliarini: Which cuts both ways, because part of the concern one m- one might have about that is that the party could become increasingly, could become possibly increasingly a regional party. It struggled this race almost everywhere else except for the northeast. So those, those are two sort of tracks of this debate that I would have my eyes on.

  What tone and style the party, the, the left looks like going forward, but also what part of the country does it seem to be taking direction from?

  Richard McColl: And of course, voters' main concerns as it seems when you read about the, the elections and situation in Brazil, crime, violence, corruption and cost of living.

  How do we think the, the Lula government will address this?

  André Pagliarini: This was one of the things Lula, the campaign struggled with in the first round giving it the sense of not being up to the task of debating, frankly, in a lot of ways, public safety. Because as the incumbent, Lula was hit very hard by Flávio Bolsonaro on issues of public safety.

  And you could... One could tell Lula would get very frustrated in interviews and things like that because by... He would point out, "Look, according to the Constitution of 1988, public safety is not an attribution of the federal government." So he would I think chafe at this idea that he is held responsible for public safety concerns, which of course is not a satisfying political answer at all.

  And so he would say he, he campaigned in part on a constitutional amendment to give the federal government more powers, to create a cabinet ministry of public safety to try to take this on. The problem is, Bolsonaro allies in, in, in the legislature did not embrace that measure, in part, a cynic might say, because they didn't wanna cede that as a political issue.

  They didn't wanna empower Lula to, to address it. It looks like that might move forward now, a constitutional amendment to create a national public safety force because that's another one of these things. We talked about how the Workers' Party sometimes has been slow to adapt. It has been slow to recognize the political potency of this argument of public safety in fueling the par- the rise of the far right.

  It's not the only thing, but it's one of the things that has fueled these people because of a legitimate concern millions of Brazilians have about whether it's safe for their children to walk down the street. Understandable. Anyone who's a parent or anyone who's walked in a city understands that fear.

  So I think we might we will probably see movement on that. Cost of living is a tough one because one of the arguments that the opposition made, again, is that the profligate spending of the Lula government was largely responsible for high interest rates. Brazil has some of the highest interest rates, if not the highest, in the entire world.

  So Flavio was, again, very able in making the connection between the high cost you pay for goods, high interest rates, and government spending, and it's Lula's fault for promising all these things and spending all this money. In the short term, I don't see an easy way for Lula to address that because he is not going to come and start cutting willy-nilly.

  What his financial advisor his economic advisors have argued Dário Durigan, the current finance minister, argued during the campaign, for example, that look, he was in a debate with one of Flavio's main economic advisors, and his point was, "We rec- we, we recognize, we the government, that we need to cut costs, we need to bring down total spending, but the question is how we do that."

  He argued the only way to do that sustainably, to cut costs, is by including society in your calculations, doing it gradually, as opposed to the chainsaw of Milei, right? And he argued only Lula is in a position to do that, to gradually cut costs sustainably without provoking protests, without provoking, backlash.

  That what Flavio was promising was too traumatic a cut, and it would have, it w- it would, it might help in the short term, but it would hurt you in the long term. So I think we are going to see a, a determined attempt to reduce the cost of total government spending gradually to see if they can bring down the trajectory of interest rates and alleviate some of that, the cost on ordinary Brazilians' lives.

  There's... You mentioned Vice President Geraldo Alckmin. There is some talk of him being the new finance minister in the, in this fourth term as a way of signaling. He's a conservative former governor of São Paulo, former opponent of Lula actually, but he would signal to the markets the government is serious about cutting costs, reining in spending, to hopefully bring down the interest rates that are bearing a lot on Brazilians' ability to buy a home, buy a car, buy appliances with those interest rates as high as they are.

  Richard McColl: You mentioned Milei, and of course we had to get to it. We had to get to the international policy, foreign policy for Brazil. Brazil obviously the biggest hitter in Latin America. I first I wanted to say, I read somewhere, the, almost I would say a conspiracy theory type thing that Milei wanted Lula to win so that, h- his influence in Washington DC isn't sidelined.

  What do you... do you read anything into that? Any credence into that?

  André Pagliarini: I have heard that from, sour- sources in not too high up, but in Brazil- Yeah ... foreign ministry that, that they had heard something similar about Argentina that, you know- Milei wants to be seen as an antagonist of Lula because it elevates Milei in a way- Yes

  to have, and one of the ways to do that during the campaign was to celebrate, if you're Milei, to celebrate Flávio, to support Flávio, to boost Flávio. But the logic of what you're describing makes sense because if Flávio had won, all of a sudden the largest legit nation in Latin America, Flávio becomes almost a de facto leader- of the ideological camp represented both by Milei and and Flávio. Someone like Kast in Chile has been, by comparison I think much more subdued, much less interested perhaps in this kind of leadership role. Milei is a much bigger personality, per- personality. I think he, he likes to be, he wants to be seen as the vanguard of this movement.

  So I think he was happy to allow Flávio to leave the region through his country. Let's put it that way. I think he was ha- nice. I,

  Richard McColl: yeah, stepping around it and then up via Ecuador. Very good. I, but so obviously y- we've now got, we have Lula. How is this going to affect relationships with, obviously it's not a great relationship that's going on between United States, the government and Brazil, but y- as we, again, we read in s- various places that that Trump, President Trump actually quite admires Lula, I think, for his combative, no-nonsense nature and his pushback

  André Pagliarini: This is one of the most difficult things, I think, to read, the relationship between Lula and Trump, which interpersonally, by all indications, as you suggest, they seem to get along.

  In fact, when Lula won in 2002, I wrote a piece for Foreign Policy in which I said, "I think these two might actually get along better than anyone would expect." And I was rid- my friends ridiculed me, family ridiculed me, and I... But I argued that these are both men of a certain generation. These are both men who feel aggrieved by what they consider to be lawfare against them, they are men who understand themselves to be indispensable to the success of their relative political movements. They're both men who have won against the odds politically. So I said, "You know what? I, it wouldn't surprise me if they get on better than people assume." And that has more or less borne out.

  The problem is the structural incompatibilities, in Brazilian interests at the moment and US interests at the moment. Marco Rubio, Secretary of State of the United States, is very much not aligned with anything Lula stands for. This is a very conservative, very anti, anti-left person motivated by hostility to the Cuban Revolution and Lula, who was an ally of the Cuban government.

  So it's one of the great, I think unknowns as we look to what a, a fourth Lula term might look like. Either we get continued détente and maybe even some warmth between Lula and Brazil and the United States as Trump becomes a lame duck if Republicans lose in the midterms. I think Trump would find himself, backed off a little bit, and maybe that opens the door to better relations.

  Or we could see things, harden and become sharper. If Flávio, for example, finds a way in the United States to keep pressure on Brazil to lobby the the White House to do that, that could spell trouble. So it's really hard to predict which way this might go because Trump, his foreign policy everywhere is just, ups and downs and left and right, and one doesn't know where they stand.

  But I am not necessarily that alarmed by where things might go. I think Lula has shown that he and Trump, despite the ch- the difficulties, find a way to avoid the absolute worst case scenario

  Richard McColl: I definitely read that piece in Foreign Policy. I rem- I remember talking about it. I remember it being a little bit thinking, "Yes, this is unusual," but there was definitely, there was reason to it.

  There was reason to it. I can understand how your family and friends might have ridiculed you a bit but there was definitely reason behind it. So if we take it as a whole now, so we see, again, a caretaker situation for this government. W- what is the... What, what is going to happen next for the right in Brazil?

  André Pagliarini: I think there's going to be we talked about the various lanes on the Lula side. I think there are various different luminaries on the right who will be competing for national attention too. I do think at this moment, as we think about the period after Lula has won, before his fourth term begins, the front runner as of now for the post-Bolsonaro national leadership probably goes to Tarcísio de Freitas, the governor of São Paulo, simply because of the size and power and prominence of the state that he governs.

  It's the largest, most powerful state. Anyone who governs that state is probably in a prime political position. On the other hand, though, what he has going against him is no governor of São Paulo has won the presidency since 1960, so very long since. Since Jânio Quadros, many- Yeah ... many years ago.

  It's not necessarily a launching pad for successful national candidates, in part because much of the rest of the country resents São Paulo. Secondly, Tarcísio doesn't have particularly charismatic political presence. He is not like Jair Bolsonaro, who had this strong, fervent, devoted following. So that, that could prove difficult.

  There's also the generational question. This, we talked about these young m- media savvy candidates on the left. The right has perhaps many, has, has maybe even more of them. Nikolas Ferreira, congressman from Minas Gerais, Lucas Pavanato from São Paulo. These are really savvy one might say politically shallow, but savvy political players who will certainly be part of the story for years to come.

  So that, though, is I think the main storyline, is the dispute for the post-Bolsonaro protagonist role on the right

  Richard McColl: and then of course, Bolsonaro, while he's saying that he's going to coordinate the opposition from Miami, as you say he's taken himself out of the equation largely by going overseas.

  And if we look in a final sort of final thing here is, we've discussed the strength obviously of the PT and Lula in the northeast and, when you look at the voting, the map of how people voted, how can Lula build bridges with São Paulo Rio Grande do Sul and places of this nature, Santa Catarina, which I don't think he g- he wanna vote in, yeah. It's ...

  André Pagliarini: Yeah. There was a story in the days immediately after the second round that Lula is already planning- a, a battery of meetings with governors from states he didn't win precisely to do that, to try to tamp down tensions, to try to, let's govern. We all have to govern, governors, me, the president, we all have to find a way to govern, to deliver for our constituents and so on and so forth.

  I do think even his opponents, Lula's opponents would recognize he is personally in a good position to do that. He, for example, he worked with Tarcísio his gov- the federal government and the state government to build one of the largest tunnel projects in recent Brazilian history in the, near the Port of Santos.

  And there was a moment where there, he, Lula was on stage with Tarcísio, they were announcing this partnership, and they were laughing together. And it was, it got a lot of attention because who but Lula could... At that point, it looked like Tarcísio might be the candidate to run against him. And they were laughing together, saying, "Hey look what we can get done despite all the noise around us."

  So I that's a point at which I'm actually fairly optimistic that Lula will be able to establish decent working relations with the governors of the various states, even the, the Bolsonarista ones, because the synergy between federal government and state government is such that it would, there are dire political consequences, to say the least, if the governors, slap that hand away, as it were.

  The challenge will be in the legislature, I think, because there is much less incentive for the Bolsonaristas to work with the federal government. So that's where I think the trouble spot would be. The governors, I think Lula might be in a good position actually to tell a better story about federal and state collaboration despite ideological differences.

  Richard McColl: Oh, refreshing to hear that. To hear that there is a solution here or potential solution. I think obviously, we look back and we will look back on this election where Lula winning with 51.8% versus 48.2% for Flávio Bolsonaro, and exceeding 4.4 million votes ahead of his rival, having lost the first round.

  So many interesting points in this conversation. Let me take this moment to say to André Pagliarini, the, the assistant professor at the Department of History in Louisiana State University, thank you so much for your time and for sharing insights into these elections and the potential for Brazil in, in, in this four years as the 81-year-old Lula takes the reins for the fourth time.

  André Pagliarini: It was a real pleasure, Richard. Thank you for the invitation. I could talk about this stuff all day and it was a joy with you, so thank you.

  Richard McColl: No. And of course, be sure to look out for Andre's books, Lula: A People's President and the Fight for Brazil's Future, and also Claiming the Nation: The Politics of Nationalism in Modern Brazil.

  What a great conversation. Remember to subscribe and of course share The LatinNews Podcast. You can find it on all platforms, YouTube, iTunes, Spotify, and beyond and we'll be back in a fortnight's time discussing more issues from the region. I've been your host, Richard McColl in Bogotá, Colombia. Thank you again