I read in the newspaper O Estado de São Paulo that Lula's change cost 500 thousand real. A high cost for who said is worker. I am a lawyer to 20 years and my patrimony doesn't arrive nor close to the cost of this change. I am forced to conclude that Lula is not a worker as he says, but a new rich one that it stayed humble (rare thing, because in Brazil several new rich are unpalatable, as some friends that I had at University and that today occupy positions in the Judiciary).
Lula arose in the life, therefore, we can say that he is a SOCIAL MOUNTAINEER. Before him to be a President I was already a lawyer. Great shit to be a lawyer in Brazil! Being SOCIAL MOUNTAINEER is more advantageous, but for this a candidate the new rich for the political road he has to accustom to lie for the other ones and to lie for himself - thing difficult to do for who has habit of doing solemnity-critic.
Gustave Le Bon affirms that in:
"... general the leaders are not thought men, but action. They are little clear-sighted and they could not be it, because the clairvoyance usually leads to the doubt and the inaction. They are recruited among the neurotic, the excited ones, semi-alienated them that they edge the madness. No matter how absurd it is the idea that they defend or the objective that they pursue, all reasoning grows weak due to his conviction. The contempt and the persecutions just excite them more. Everything sacrifices, his personal interest, his family. The own survival instinct is annulled in them the such point that a lot of times the only reward that they ask is the martyrdom. The intensity of the faith checks to their words a great suggestion power. The crowd always listens to the man endowed with strong will. As the individuals gathered in the crowd lose all will, they turn instinctively for who possesses it". (PSYCHOLOGY OF THE CROWDS)
Is this a description of Lula's profile? I cannot answer this question. I didn't meet Lula before him to be a President and, to tell the truth, I don't want to know him now that he is a former-president. Besides, I am not a psychologist.
Why Lula emerged exactly in the strikes of 1977? This is a question that can be answered.
It is fact more than well-known that in 1964 the Brazilian left suffered an immense defeat. With the reaction, the Dictatorship felt reared and it still imposed to the left a defeat more painful when of the promulgation of the AI-5
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI-5. The increase of the repression deprived the life of some, the mental health of many and the will of struggling of most. Some years later the left, that it had already been annihilated in the cities, it would be exterminated physically during the repression to Araguaia Guerrilla (that happened some years before the strikes driven by Lula).
The Brazilian syndicalism that existed before the coup d'état (that was ideological and linked to the left parties) it had been destroyed or it had surrendered completely in reason of the social comfort produced by the economical miracle. Then, when the things no longer they went so well in the economical area appears Lula, a syndical leader endowed with an unbreakable willpower and that it believed firmly in another syndicalism proposal (a syndicalism at first without connections with political parties and focused in the economical results).
The destroyed left saw in that driver of workers a possible left leader (thing that he was only for a deviation of the own time in that it appeared). Following him the left suffered a defeat still larger as the syndical leader grew and he made way for the power beside entrepreneurs and bankers. In spite of the commitments that it went assuming with the renewal of the capitalism and of the Brazilian State, Lula knew how to maintain a certain left speech. His victory elapsed, in great measure of his trump card. Lula always had and he wanted to have proximity with the Brazilian pleb, thing that the industrial and financial elite of right never wanted and that the centralist-bureaucratic left either wanted.
Lula is the synthesis of a time that passed. Is to rebuild the Brazilian left possible? At this time I believe that not. The echoes of the symphony produced by the enchanter of serpents of São Bernardo will continue to reflect while their devoted apostles follow occupying comfortablyt he positions of power that learned how to divide with the traditional Brazilian right (right to the that everything indicates, it begins rejuvenating under Aécio Neves' leadership).
The current situation of Brazil reminds of Italy a lot under Betino Craxi in that PCI + Mafia + Catholic Church dominated the scene in an unanswerable way. It is in this road that Lula put us. The equation of Brazil in a close future is the same of that sad Italy that ended in something still worse under Berlusconi.