Daniel Imperato – Official Website
Daniel Imperato For President 2024
First published by Global Research on June 1, 2022
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Rental signs outside Georgian buildings in Dublin city center, Ireland on February 15, 2023. (Artur Widak / Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
On April 1, amid a protracted housing crisis that has been steadily mounting in scale and intensity, the Irish government lifted an eviction ban that had protected tenants since last October. As the current housing minister Darragh O’Brien conceded, the predictable outcome will be a rise in already record-breaking levels of homelessness.
Whatever way you look at this hydra-headed housing crisis (which seems increasingly unmanageable for the ruling parties), it has produced catastrophic effects for the country’s residents, particularly in urban areas. Emergency accommodation houses 11,988 people, with others sequestered away in more hidden forms of homelessness. Those who wish to buy will see that house prices are now seven times the median income.
But we can find the most striking symptoms of the crisis in the private rental sector, as is the case in many other countries. One day last August, only 716 homes were available to rent in the south of Ireland, and rents stood at an all-time high. Even mainstream liberal commentators detect unmistakable signs that Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael have “decided to bring back nineteenth-century landlordism, to reshape Ireland as a nation beholden to private property owners.”
Overcoming the crisis will require a comprehensive transformation of the Irish housing system. But how are we going to achieve this?
Exasperated at the ineffectual efforts of bourgeois reformers, Friedrich Engels wrote in 1872 that the “housing question” could only be resolved by ending the capitalist mode of production. Yet Ireland’s capitalist class and its political elite are clearly not staring down the barrel of social revolution, however unanchored they may be in economic reality. While the problems with housing “may not be resolvable under capitalism,” argue Peter Marcuse and David Madden in their book In Defense of Housing, “the shape of the housing system can be acted upon, modified, and changed.”
To make sense of the Irish housing crisis, you have to understand why the development of the southern Irish state has been so bound up with housing and property.
If you want to make sense of the housing crisis, you have to understand why the development of the southern Irish state has been so bound up with housing and property. By drawing this historical arc, we can see how the underlying philosophy shaping Irish housing policy for a hundred years in the South — the North deserves its own analysis — has been an unhealthy obsession with owner-occupation. This preference interacted with the forces of globalization and the neoliberal turn to bring us to where we are today.
In the apocalyptic aftermath of an Gorta Mór (the Great Famine), an agrarian movement called the Land League, formed in 1879, organized the rural poor in Ireland into a mass national campaign that resisted evictions and employed rent strikes and boycotts. It eventually concluded that the only way to defeat a vampiric form of rural landlordism was through widescale farmer-tenant proprietorship. This dream soon became a reality.
Before the British state carried out agrarian reforms in response to popular mobilizations known more broadly as the Land Wars, thirteen thousand landlords owned the land of rural Ireland. By 1920, tenants had purchased 316,000 holdings. These tenants became private land- and homeowners, beneficiaries of a mass division and redistribution of estates held by the Anglo-Irish ruling class.
Politically, as the historian Diarmaid Ferriter writes, the implication was that the descendants of the “Land War generation” were “imbued with the idea that home ownership was the ultimate goal and renting was wasted money.” Those descendants, Ferriter concludes a little too definitively, were the “inheritors of a conservative impulse.”
After gaining independence, the nascent post-partition state in the South would come to assume a leading role in providing housing capital by funding a relatively large social-housing construction program, which constituted a majority of the housing built from the 1920s to the 1950s. At the same time, it also played an outsized role in the funding and building of dwellings for owner-occupation, its preferred type of tenure.
Similar surges in output during the 1960s and ’70s could not conceal the fact that government subsidies still favored, to a considerable degree, the private home-buyer more than the social-housing tenant. The 1966 Housing Act was a further boon for private ownership, extending the right of purchase to all local authority tenants. Come 1969, local authorities had sold an astonishing 64,490 council homes.
As the Sinn Féin housing spokesperson and author Eoin Ó Broin points out, the “largest output of housing in the history of the State” during the 1970s was severely undercut by the “massive transfer of stock from the public to the private sector via tenant purchase.” This transfer tipped the balance in favor of homeownership further still.
Irish governments prioritized ownership of property over other forms of social protection.
Private homeownership, having stood at 52.6 percent in 1946, rose to 70 percent in 1971. The ruling conservative parties could reasonably have felt that this was the crowning achievement of the modern Irish state, after centuries of absenteeism, dispossession, and insecurity.
In a landmark study, Michelle Norris disputes the widely held assumption that the southern Irish state failed to develop a comprehensive welfare regime like many of its Western European counterparts. Instead, she argues, a paradigm called “asset-based welfare” meant that Irish governments prioritized ownership of property over other forms of social protection, reminding us of Ferriter’s contestable, if resonant, notion of the inherited conservative impulse.
From the 1980s onward, the structure of the system did not change — just the way in which it was financed. In his book Sins of the Father, Conor McCabe writes of a kind of “revolution” that was underway at the time:
Banks were becoming “one-stop shops” for financial services, and the Irish government played its part by changing the rules and allowing building societies and insurance companies to compete with high-street banks in the areas of personal and business loans.
The impact of credit and financial liberalization combined with the withdrawal of the Irish state from providing homes and funding their construction. The 1980s saw a 30 percent collapse in the output of social housing compared to the previous decade.
The 1980s saw a 30 percent collapse in the output of social housing compared to the previous decade.
Yet as Ó Broin explains, the effects of credit liberalization on house prices were “more delayed than in Britain,” where the Thatcher government was engaged in a mass sell-off of council housing. By the time prices started creeping upward, financial deregulation and banking standardization steered through by the European Union in the 1990s exacerbated the trend — in particular the newfound access to cheap credit for Irish financial institutions arising from membership of the single currency.
Housing in Ireland, now thoroughly financialized, was thus central to the boom and bust of the Celtic Tiger. In 1994, the average price of a house in the state was €72,000. By 2004, it had soared to €249,000.
Then came the crash of 2008. Construction, private sector investment, and capital spending vanished overnight. Successive austerity budgets by the Fianna Fáil–led government slashed capital expenditure in social and affordable housing from €1.5 billion in 2008 to €485 million in 2011. After the bailout, when the Irish state lost its fiscal sovereignty to the European Union–European Central Bank–International Monetary Fund troika, social-housing output plummeted, shrinking to a new historic low of 642 units in 2014.
Meanwhile, housing affordability became a growing problem in the private rental sector, which had expanded during the Celtic Tiger as investors flooded into the market through buy-to-let mortgages. Rents in the state ballooned by 68 per cent between 2010 and 2021. Across the EU as a whole during that period, rents rose by just 16 per cent.
By explicit design of government policy, the latest phase of the crisis has increasingly been fueled by investment from what scholars call asset-manager capitalism.
In 2014, the introduction of the landlord-friendly Housing Assistance Payment led, as Ó Broin notes, to a situation whereby “non-subsidised renters were being crowded out of the private rental sector by increasing numbers of social housing tenants.” He describes this as ground zero for the terrifying excesses of the homelessness crisis. All the while, house prices were rocketing skyward, squeezing prospective home-buyers into an ever-larger pool of tenants.
By explicit design of government policy, the latest phase of the crisis has increasingly been fueled by investment from what scholars call asset-manager capitalism. In the words of Rory Hearne, real estate investment trusts (REITS) and similar funds of that kind desire the creation of “a permanent renting class,” out of which they can wrench endless rents.
The economist Josh Ryan-Collins observes that this state-sponsored swarming of asset-management institutions around real estate in Ireland is a global phenomenon, as the “wall of liquidity created by Quantitative Easing” resulted in a search for “high yielding, but safe assets.” When those engaged in this search made it to Ireland, they set their sights on distressed commercial assets that were being held by Ireland’s National Asset Management Agency (NAMA).
Now that the market for commercial assets is contracting, the “wall of liquidity” has moved into the domain of residential development. Deploying scorched-earth investment strategies, these institutional landlords — who bought just seventy-six units in Ireland in 2010 — scooped up 5,132 homes in 2019, and now own more than forty-five thousand across the country.
Put simply, the private rental sector is completely broken, blighted by severe supply shortages and unaffordable, exploitative rents. Various rent subsidy schemes for social-housing tenants also drain close to €1 billion from the exchequer to fill the coffers of private landlords. Only harebrained schemes to line the pockets of developers are forthcoming from the government. The crisis thus rages on with no end in sight.
To make matters worse, the coalition government, in full knowledge of the scale of the crisis and the breadth and depth of hardship, has failed to spend over €1 billion of its housing budget over the last three years. Of perhaps greater concern is the unforgivable refusal of local authorities to spend 90 percent of their allocated affordable housing budget across 2021 and 2022. But if the system appears to be at a tipping point, then where are the main, viable solutions coming from on the Irish left?
On behalf of Sinn Féin, Ó Broin has put forward various proposals, mapping out in detail the most compelling reformist alternative. This vision closely resembles the housing policies supported by the strongest socialist force in the Dáil, People Before Profit (PBP). PBP’s ideas differ from those of Ó Broin in making an explicit call for rents to be set at a percentage of take-home pay and advocating the nationalization of all dwellings owned by corporate landlords. Few on the Left would resist such moves to radically rebalance the system.
On behalf of Sinn Féin, Eoin Ó Broin has put forward various proposals, mapping out in detail the most compelling reformist alternative.
So what are Ó Broin’s solutions? Chiefly, in the medium to long term, “the expansion of public housing on a scale not seen in the history of the State,” with something in the order of an additional 230,000 public housing units over the next ten years. Ideally, he argues, this would be led by resurgent local authorities that had been reassigned the power to build and build. Developments would be mixed-tenure and mixed-income, as well as world-class from the point of view of amenities and architecture. The housing movement also sees a constitutional right to housing as an imperative.
Ó Broin’s most interesting policy idea may be his lease-holding suggestion. Firstly, he argues, “the land on which the affordable purchase home sits should never be sold, rather it should be leased to the homeowner indefinitely at no or low cost.” Secondly, to avert re-commodification, it should not be possible to sell the property on the private market. A slightly diluted version of this model of affordable housing has already been developed, on a micro-scale, by Ó Cualann Cohousing Alliance in Dublin since 2017.
According to Ó Broin, public-private partnerships, sales of public land, private rental subsidies, and long-term leasing arrangements “all introduce ever greater levels of profit maximisation” and should be phased out of the public housing sector. To address the short-term affordability crisis as we await the largest house-building program in the state’s history, O Bróin has proposed an immediate three-year rent freeze, which would replace the existing, unfit-for-purpose Rent Pressure Zones.
To achieve a reduction in existing rents, he also wishes to introduce a refundable tax relief, pegged to “8.3 percent of rent paid in the previous year.” A three-year rent freeze, combined with a refundable tax relief alongside an ambitious program of public house-building, should in Ó Broin’s view see “private rental supply and in turn rents start to return to pre-peak levels by the time the freeze and relief expire.”
Even if these policies are successful, should the limit of our ambition, against a backdrop of hyperinflated rents and stagnating wages, be to return the cost of rent to precrisis levels? For Sinn Fein at least, that seems to be the case.
Other policy interventions called for by Ó Broin include greater tenant participation in policy formulation and decision-making as well as far-reaching land reform. The latter could, he maintains, be tackled by actively increasing the stock of publicly owned land, reintroducing credit controls, and reviewing the current vacant tax rate. More broadly, he wants a reconsideration of how “land speculation is financed and taxed” in order to “end the corrosive impact of speculative investment in land on the housing system.”
The continued use of Irish housing as an asset class by international asset-management institutions deepens the links between the domestic housing system and global financial markets. For economist Ann Pettifor, the main “propellant” of this crisis is not supply shortages but an excess of finance. House prices will fall, she has argued, “when the propellant is withdrawn — and flows of finance decline.”
There is a serious engagement with the history of financialization in the interventions of Ó Broin, Hearne, and others. However, they fail to fully connect the financial exuberance that underpins the current economic order in Ireland to the need for a reformed housing system. Extra supply will not resolve everything.
Irish housing activism must make arguments that challenge the entire edifice of housing commodification and Irish capitalism.
We should therefore place greater emphasis on land reforms. We should also give more consideration to whether a continuation of the current Irish economic model — based on an overreliance on foreign direct investment, with Ireland as an intermediary zone between US and European capital — will allow for the kinds of reforms that are required, and not simply bake further instability and pricing flux into the system.
As the example of Finland has shown, the policy of Housing First — giving homeless people a home unconditionally, preferably with integrated support in a context of higher supply — can work and come close to ending different types of homelessness. It is also necessary to rein in the brutal predations of landlordism through regulation and possibly new taxes.
A common narrative suggests that this whole crisis was not a necessary outcome of Irish economic policy in general but rather a housing-policy failure in particular, which arises from the misjudgments of politicians, not any inner logic of capital. If not for those misjudgments, everything might be okay.
However, this reasoning is seriously flawed and myopic. Irish housing activism must make arguments that challenge the entire edifice of housing commodification and Irish capitalism.
A militant uprising in the style of the nineteenth-century Land Wars seems unlikely, and not only because those struggles arose from the specific historical conditions of post-famine rural Ireland. It is also because Sinn Féin, on the brink of real power for the first time in the South, has effectively monopolized the debate on an alternative model, ably assisted by housing activists, the socialist left, and even some social democrats in other parties.
Postcrash Ireland witnessed a new wave of extra-parliamentary housing activism.
Over the past decade, however, there have been real echoes of the Land Wars on the ground, particularly in Dublin. Postcrash Ireland witnessed a new wave of extra-parliamentary housing activism, from Housing Action Now to Home Sweet Home to Take Back the City. These campaign groups emerged to build a counternarrative on the housing crisis and engaged in forms of direct action such as the occupation of vacant buildings. Many were connected to the Right2Water campaign, Ireland’s largest grassroots mobilization so far this century.
Formed in 2019, Community Action Tenants Union (CATU), the only tenants’ union in Ireland, has gone from strength to strength, accumulating members across the island on an all-Ireland basis. Along with the inherent difficulty in organizing atomized tenants, Irish tenant politics, in the judgement of Michael Byrne, suffers from political centralization, which moves sites of organized conflict away from the city or town to central government.
This is an obstacle CATU must overcome, but it is not helped by the passivity of the trade-union movement and the pacifying effects on the housing movement of NGOs. A number of small charities that rely heavily on state funding are among the loudest voices in the debate, yet simultaneously find themselves unable to advocate for sufficiently radical change because of “service level agreements” and the threat of losing access to funding.
We can see the consequences of this “NGOization” of the response to the housing crisis most starkly in advocacy over homelessness. As some scholars have observed, the Apollo House occupation maintained a rather “restricted focus on homelessness” that “failed to connect up with the wider impacts of the housing crisis.”
Today, we run the risk of succumbing to the same temptations: focusing our attention on rising homelessness and evictions at the expense of reexamining a wider system that also alienates us in our workplaces and in our everyday interactions with the world around us. As Marcuse and Madden argue, a “truly radical right to housing” cannot be limited to a narrow legal right: it must “comprise a similarly expansive set of political demands”.
Even if a left-leaning coalition led by Sinn Féin comes to power, it would leave the current economic model largely untouched, so activists should not rest on their laurels. Given the scale of the crisis, all actions should be on the table. During the Land Wars, the Whiteboys and Ribbonmen — secret organizations whose tactical repertoires included attacking landlords and their property — attracted notoriety.
But much more recently, at a time when levels of trade-union density and activity were high in Ireland in a European context, tenants still undertook national rent strikes. In 1972 and 1973, tens of thousands of tenants fought back against deteriorating housing conditions and spiraling rents. Powered by a social movement, the Left can confront the beast head on, smashing the neoliberal consensus on housing and cleansing the system of predatory land and property speculation.
King Charles III shakes hands with Prime Minister Rishi Sunak at the Commonwealth Heads of Government Leaders Meeting at Marlborough House on May 5, 2023 in London, England. (Chris Jackson/Getty Images)
The world’s biggest tax haven empire has a new king. King Charles III will be anointed, blessed, and consecrated on May 6. He is sovereign over Great Britain, the Crown Dependencies, and the British Overseas Territories, which collectively inflict nearly 40 percent of the tax revenue losses around the world.
Britain was starting to spin its web of tax havens around the time Charles was born in the late 1940s. Britain allowed and often encouraged this insidious second empire as many nations were breaking from the shackles of European and British colonialism. Currently, British tax havens aid and abet multinational corporations shifting profits out of the countries where most of the real business happens. Wealthy and powerful individuals are also able to hide money and assets behind the secretive laws of the spider’s web.
The Tax Justice Network — a coalition of activists and scholars campaigning against tax avoidance — sent an open letter to King Charles urging the monarch to address the economic and human cost imposed by the British tax havens over which he is sovereign. The letter details the organization’s latest research, which estimates that British tax havens mete out a total tax loss of more than $189 billion per year on the world. The total tax losses are more than three times the humanitarian aid budget the UN needs this year to help 230 million people living on the brink after multiple disasters.
While Britain’s overseas aid has dwindled in recent years, unwinding the web of tax havens instead would help many governments fulfill the rights of their citizens. If we were to reverse the tax revenue losses caused by the UK spider’s web, there would be thirty-six million more people with access to basic sanitation, eighteen million more people with access to basic drinking water, and almost seven million children could attend school for an extra year, according to the Universities of St Andrews and Leicester modeling tool GRADE.
Yet, the British political establishment doesn’t look ready to reform. Successive Conservative prime ministers and their families have been fingered in leaks and investigations, including the Panama and Pandora Papers. The wife of current British prime minister Rishi Sunak also played the tax game, avoiding an estimated £2.1 million per year in taxes from foreign income.
The British government has also undermined efforts to transform international tax law. For the last sixty years, the UK — along with the exclusive club of the richest nations at the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) — has set rules to its own benefit. African states, in an act of defiance, presented a resolution at the UN in November 2022 that paves the way for negotiations on an international tax cooperation framework instead. The UK and its OECD friends unsuccessfully pulled out all the stops to prevent a vote, and spoke out against the resolution, but ultimately joined in its unanimous adoption. They will likely throw many hurdles in the way to stop negotiations from getting off the ground at the UN General Assembly later this year, as their initial input to the Secretary-General Tax Report makes clear.
In his speech to the Commonwealth Heads of Government in Rwanda last year, King Charles, then Prince of Wales, expressed his sorrow over Britain’s “most painful period of history.” “To unlock the power of our common future,” he said, “we must also acknowledge the wrongs which have shaped our past.”
The British royalty’s long reign over these wrongs was succeeded by a new form of plunder, exacted today by Britain’s tax haven empire. King Charles has an opportunity to stop the clock running on this plunder. As the inheritor of the British Crown and its legacy, King Charles could use his unique position to encourage dialogue on UN leadership over international tax rules — a move that could pivot the course and legacies of history — and support the right of African countries to exercise sovereignty over their taxing rights at the UN General Assembly.
At home, the king might rightly argue that he has no business interfering in the UK government’s policies. It may be His Majesty’s Government, but it’s a democratically elected government of its people. We should not expect Charles to outline his positions on the need for the UK finally to meet its commitments to end anonymous companies that make it too easy for criminals and would-be tax evaders to hide assets and illicit money, or to introduce public country-by-country reporting so that multinational companies’ tax abuse remains largely out of sight. In the UK, the reporting would have increased corporate income tax by £2.5 billion per year.
What we can hope for, however, is that the new king will set the tone for the end of his tax haven empire. By acknowledging publicly Britain’s leading global role in tax abuse, and the human costs this imposes all around the world, Charles could make a necessary break from the history of imperial and royal denial. He could point the way to reparative funding for territories that make up the tax haven empire, as well as to those countries in Africa and elsewhere where the empire’s most violent extraction took place.
Extensive slavery routes and sanctioned colonial pillaging all added jewels to the crown over centuries, some of which make appearances at coronations. King Charles himself also has some questionable wealth and tax practices. Without changes in its tax havens and the global tax rules, Britain will continue to rack up its bill of reparations to former colonies.
King Charles, then Prince of Wales, reads the Queen’s speech next to her Imperial State Crown in the House of Lords Chamber, during the State Opening of Parliament in the House of Lords at the Palace of Westminster on May 10, 2022 in London, England. (Alastair Grant – WPA Pool / Getty Images)
Despite much officially sanctioned mourning, most Canadians reacted to the death of Queen Elizabeth II with ambivalence. Muted as this response may have been, its emotional scale dwarfed anything elicited by the coronation of Charles III. Today, the British monarchy is a withered husk, the stuff of middlebrow Netflix dramas and condemnatory exposés featuring its own former members. The jig is up, even if the institution officially remains, and whatever legitimacy the institution may have once enjoyed is palpably a thing of the past.
Even before the death of the queen, Canadians’ bond with their formal head of state was less than intimate. Polled by the Dominion Institute in 2009, a full three-quarters didn’t even realize the title belonged to her to begin with, a clear reflection of the monarchy’s effective nonexistence in Canadian civic life. Over the past decade or so, public support for the maintenance of ties has waned still further, and the latest data suggests no slowing of the trend. On the eve of Charles’ coronation, a survey from the Angus Reid Institute found that a mere 28 percent of Canadians have a favorable view of him, while a full 60 percent don’t want to recognize him as king. Just over half, meanwhile, don’t want their country to remain a constitutional monarchy.
Compared to Australia or Barbados (which declared itself a republic in 2021), Canada has not hosted a strong republican current since the nineteenth century, though dissent against the monarchy has been a sporadic feature of its political landscape. Thanks to Quebec nationalism, the monarchy has tended to be less popular in French Canada, where members of the province’s national assembly have sometimes refused to take the constitutionally mandated loyalty oaths and, in 1976, premier René Lévesque protested the queen’s participation in the Montreal Olympics.
Something similar recently spread to Ontario, where indigenous members of the province’s legislature have refused to sing “God Save the Queen.” After the death of Queen Elizabeth last year, indigenous MPP Sol Mamakwa and half of his caucus colleagues from the social democratic Ontario New Democratic Party declined to participate in a mandated pledge of allegiance to her successor.
The usual rejoinder to republican sentiment in Canada is that the country’s constitutional arrangements make breaking ties with the monarchy impossible. To “open up the constitution” is to trigger memories of the divisive constitutional negotiations of the early 1980s, which ultimately prompted years of fraught debates over rights, federal and provincial jurisdiction, and national identity. Angus Reid’s polling, however, finds a resounding 88 percent of Canadians are fine with the idea of doing exactly that in the service of formally severing the country from Britain.
Such a process might be technically complicated, and any actual constitutional change would among other things have to take into account existing treaties between the British crown and indigenous people. But a popular referendum could lend it considerable weight, and the available evidence suggests that the pro-monarchy side would struggle to mount a case many would find convincing.
At least some of Canadians’ ambivalence toward the monarchy undoubtedly has to do with the figures who will now be fronting for it. If the House of Windsor had opted to buck tradition and offer up Charles and Camilla’s probable successors instead, there might, at the very least, be a bit more coronation fanfare. Regardless, the institution’s place in Canadian public life would almost certainly remain what it is today: a passive and unimportant presence that few would miss, if they even noticed it was gone to begin with.
Lula da Silva at a press conference in Lisbon, Portugal, April 22, 2023. (Horacio Villalobos / Corbis via Getty Images)
Ever since taking office four months ago, Brazil’s President Luis Inácio Lula da Silva, more commonly known as Lula, has faced the arduous task of rebuilding the country’s institutions, as well as its international image, following the chaotic Bolsonaro administration.
So far, this challenge has generated a mixed bag of successes and failures, with a number of stumbles that have tested Lula’s reputation as a political “miracle worker.” With issues ranging from a conservative-dominated Congress to an antagonistic central bank, the seventy-seven-year-old former union leader is finding governing a harder task than ever as he sets about his third term as president.
Lula campaigned mostly on the idea of a return to more prosperous days for Brazil — particularly those of his previous administration. Having left office in 2010 with record-high approval ratings, Lula now relied on voters remembering the 2000s, when Brazil had a strong economy and a rapidly growing middle class that was partly a product of his government’s social policies, as well as favorable international relations with both China and the United States.
After winning his third term by a narrow margin last year, Lula tried to carry this idea that “happy days are here again” into his administration. “Brazil is back,” he proclaimed in his inaugural speech. It was at the same time a promise to the world and a condemnation of the past four years of Jair Bolsonaro.
Lula’s rhetoric to date has been consistent with this view. His focus on growing the economy, increasing social spending, and rebuilding Brazil’s diplomatic standing come right off his 2000s playbook. However, the president has been forced to confront the fact that Brazil and the world are both in radically different situations than the ones he faced on first taking the presidential seat in 2003.
Lula campaigned mostly on the idea of a return to more prosperous days for Brazil — particularly those of his previous administration.
While every Brazilian government since the end of the military dictatorship in the 1980s has ruled through some form of coalition, Lula’s grand alliance has tested the limits of Brazil’s multiparty system. It brings together parties ranging from far-left socialists to center-right neoliberals, generating more than a few dissenting voices and directions within the new government.
This big-tent approach was effective as a “United Front for Democracy” when confronting Bolsonaro in the 2022 election. Yet the many political forces it contained soon cashed in the promises and concessions they had obtained from the Lula campaign, in many cases receiving high-ranking positions within his administration.
Out of the thirty-seven cabinet positions in his government, only ten are held by Lula’s own Workers’ Party (PT). Simone Tebet of the center-right Democratic Brazilian Movement, who came third place in the presidential election campaigning on a neoliberal platform, became minister for planning and budgets after supporting Lula in the second round of the election.
There were some more controversial appointments. Minister of Communications Juscelino Filho, from the conservative União Brasil, came under fire when it was revealed that he had millions in undisclosed assets.
Tourism Minister Daniela Carneiro, who belongs to the same party as Filho, is linked to militias in Rio de Janeiro. Militias allegedly connected to the Bolsonaro family were responsible for the 2018 killing of activist Marielle Franco, whose sister Anielle Franco currently sits in the same cabinet as Lula’s minister of racial equality.
Most shocking were the revelations that General Gonçalves Dias, minister of the institutional security bureau, played an active part in the January 8 attack on government buildings by disgruntled Bolsonaro supporters who rejected the legitimacy of Lula’s election. Dias resigned as minister — to date the only member of Lula’s cabinet to do so.
This relative stability at cabinet level, even when faced with controversial revelations, might be attributed in part to the need of Lula’s government to convey a steady image. When contrasted to Bolsonaro’s revolving-door cabinet, with ministers resigning or being fired on a routine basis, Lula’s unchanging lineup might transmit the message of a return to order and normalcy that he has been clamoring for in speeches.
The president cannot afford to fire ministers from parties whose support he needs not only to pass legislation, but also to prevent political maneuvers against his own person.
On a more pragmatic level, Lula’s ruling coalition at the moment has razor-thin margins in Congress. The president simply cannot afford to fire ministers from parties whose support he needs not only to pass legislation, but also to prevent political maneuvers against his own person. The impeachment of Dilma Rousseff in 2016 set a precedent for the removal of unpopular presidents if they lose the support of Congress. The significant victories of far-right candidates in the 2022 legislative elections have only worsened this danger for Lula.
Lula’s weak base in Congress also explains the lack of any major legislation passed in the last few months. While on paper the president has the numbers needed to pass laws, when it comes to specific examples of reform, congressmen from parties such as União have vocally insisted that they will not vote along party lines to support Lula. On the other hand, members of non-coalition parties like the Progressives have suggested they would be willing to back Lula’s legislation in some instances.
In practical terms, this balance of forces has discouraged the Lula administration from pursuing any immediate votes on major issues. A defeat in Congress might damage the already fragile state of the new government in such a polarized political setting.
Unforeseen events have dominated the first four months of Lula’s presidency. First and foremost, Lula had been attempting to rebuild regulatory institutions that were stripped clean by the Bolsonaro administration. Agencies such as Brazilian Institute of Environment and Renewable Natural Resources (IBAMA) and National Indian Foundation (FUNAI), which are respectively responsible for the struggle against deforestation and indigenous protection, were virtually defunded in the past four years. Lula has committed to empower these bodies.
This was already a hot topic during the election campaign. But the revelation in January of numerous human rights abuses against the Yanomami people, which some have gone so far as to call purposeful extermination, increased the need for government focus on the issue.
During the opening months of 2023, the southeast of Brazil was hit by record levels of rainfall which generated intense floods as well as landslides. Flooding is a frequent problem for Brazilian infrastructure. Coming right in the middle of Carnival season, when many people were traveling to the most vulnerable coastal areas, this episode caught governmental officials unawares and led to debates about infrastructure reform. The national tragedy brought Lula together with the Bolsonarist governor of São Paulo, Tarcísio de Freitas, as both men coordinated efforts to provide aid to the affected areas.
Lula had been attempting to rebuild regulatory institutions that were stripped clean by the Bolsonaro administration.
The attack on Brasília by Bolsonaro supporters on January 8 galvanized the administration to address the issue of national security and the role of the military. Investigations of the event have revealed extensive knowledge of and support for the attack in the Brazilian armed forces. The relationship between the military and Brazil’s democratic government, which is complex and uneasy at the best of times, is remarkably tense at present.
During Lula’s first and second terms in office, the possibility of a military intervention against the executive had been virtually nonexistent. Yet now, after what we can only categorize as a coup attempt, albeit a remarkably disorganized one, the president has to tread carefully when dealing with the military leadership. The government response to the attacks was immediate, with the justice minister, Flávio Dino, promising swift justice and arrests, going so far as to call those involved “terrorists.”
As the role of the military in the events of January 8 comes more and more to light, it is yet to be seen whether Lula will pursue a more conciliatory or a more punitive stance toward Brazil’s military institutions. While he dismissed General Dias from his post following the exposure of his involvement, no charges have been brought forward against the general.
Lula’s first major goal is his economic plan, which has brought him into direct conflict with the current president of the Central Bank of Brazil, the Bolsonaro-appointed Roberto Campos Neto. Under Campos Neto’s guidance, the Central Bank has committed itself to high interest rates, much to the consternation of Lula who believes that lowering the rates might stimulate the economy.
Historically, the Central Bank of Brazil has been autonomous of the elected government, and Campos Neto has the authority to keep interest rates high. However, Lula has expressed indignation at the political leanings of a supposedly neutral figure and the fact that his monetary policy might hasten a recession later this year.
Throughout March, the president issued critical statements about Campos Neto, in a gesture that many considered a breach of protocol. There was intense criticism of Lula from the Brazilian financial sector, which seems to be content with the position of the Central Bank.
Two of Lula’s closest advisors, Fernando Haddad and Gleisi Hoffmann, clashed over the government’s economic plan.
There has also been division within the ranks of the PT, as two of Lula’s closest advisors, Fernando Haddad and Gleisi Hoffmann, clashed over the economic plan. Haddad, the current Treasury minister who ran as the PT candidate in the 2018 presidential election, has argued for a moderate stance, while Hoffmann, the party president, has called for a more expansive approach to social spending in education and health care.
Lula’s comments over the last few months seemed to lean more toward Hoffmann, as he reiterated his classic slogan that “education is not an expense, but an investment.” Haddad’s Treasury ministry criticized this argument. The Haddad Plan, as it is known, aims to establish certain caps on expenditure in order to increase the budgetary surplus for the coming years. Whatever Lula thinks about the matter, it seems that the plan will go to a vote in the first congressional semester of 2023 — the first major legislative challenge for Lula’s government.
On foreign affairs, Lula has attempted to turn back the clock to the 2000s, when Brazil’s diplomatic goal was to pursue a multilateral global arrangement through the framework of BRICS (the economic partnership of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and later South Africa).
He has reestablished the government’s commitment to the Chinese market and recently taken steps toward severing the country’s reliance on the dollar. On April 12, the first direct transaction between Brazil and Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC), China’s largest bank, was conducted using the renminbi instead of the dollar, signifying a clear move by Brazil away from the US economic sphere.
The global context, however, is not as benign as it was in the 2000s, when amicable relations between the United States, China, and Russia still appeared feasible. Brazil’s policy toward Russia, for example, has proved controversial in view of the war in Ukraine: Lula’s statement, later retracted, that both countries were equally responsible for the conflict generated intense criticism in the West.
The global context is not as benign as it was in the 2000s, when amicable relations between the United States, China, and Russia still appeared feasible.
Brazil’s historic position of “benign multipolarity” — as it was described under the government of Rousseff — or the “Lula Doctrine” — as some have referred to it more recently — traces its roots back to the time when the country played a key role in the Non-Aligned Movement during the Cold War. Brazilian foreign policy rejected the idea of taking an ideological side in favor of pragmatic relations to strengthen regional powers.
After the end of the Cold War, this doctrine rejected the US role as a “hyperpower,” instead favoring trade with emerging markets such as those of China and India. This was an approach that Lula wholeheartedly embraced during his first two terms. Yet it has become much more difficult to follow in an increasingly polarized world. For Lula’s government, preserving a relationship with Russia and approaching the Chinese market might mean distancing oneself from the US and European spheres, even inadvertently.
Thus far, Lula’s administration has had to deal with environmental, human rights, and political crises that have in many ways detracted from its long-term policy proposals. However, that situation is rapidly changing, as the government has brought forward its new economic plan and begun clarifying its foreign policy agenda. Over the coming months, Lula’s ability to articulate his agenda through such a troublesome Congress, prevent an economic recession, and preserve a multipolar diplomatic relationship for Brazil will be put to the test.
Incisive and carefully documented analysis by the late Prof. Graeme MacQueen. His legacy will live
First published by Global Research on March 15, 2017
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The city of Davis, California, was rocked by a horrific spate of stabbings near the University of California-Davis campus in March and April. But now, after an intense investigation, the safety of the community can be restored.
On May 4, the City of Davis Police Department arrested Carlos Dominguez, 21, in connection with the three stabbings, and he is now facing charges.
The first, on April 27th, was the death of David Breaux. A beloved community man, he was sadly stabbed in Central Park next to the University of California-Davis campus.
The second, two days later, was Karim Majdi Abou Najm, a UC-Davis senior who had only weeks left before graduating with a degree in computer science. He, too, was found with multiple fatal stab wounds in Sycamore Park.
The third was a woman who was attacked inside her tent on 2nd and L Streets and only survived after undergoing surgery at UC-Davis Medical Center.
Police served a search warrant at Dominguez’s shared home in Davis on May 4, finding “significant and related evidence” that implicated the suspect. With a series of tip calls to the police department linking him to the nearby Sycamore Park.
On May 4 he was charged with two counts of murder for the deaths of Breaux and Najm and one count of attempted murder for the woman’s stabbing.
UC-Davis officials report that Dominguez was a third-year student at the university until April 25, when he was “separated for academic reasons.” To honor Najm, the university has created a fund to financially support undergraduate students doing research.
At a news conference, Chief Darren Pytel gave the community a sense of relief when he confirmed that all three incidents are connected, and the suspect is allegedly the sole perpetrator.