Twenty years after the first time, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva will assume the Presidency of Brazil in the presence of authorities from fifty countries and with a great popular festival that will bring together some 300,000 people.
(Read: Brazil: Lula da Silva completes his cabinet before his inauguration on Sunday)
Lula was in power for two consecutive periods, between 2003 and 2010, and returns to the Presidency at the age of 77 and after a tough electoral campaign in which he defeated the ultra-rightist in the second round by just 1.8 percentage points. Jair Bolsonarowho this Friday unexpectedly left for the United States.
The inauguration ceremony will be held in the midst of a vast police operation, which will mobilize some 15,000 agents of all State security forces, due to threats from violent groups of the Bolsonaro extreme right.
(Also: The challenges that the new government of Brazil will face)
These radicals have caused serious disorder in Brasilia in recent weeks and have even tried to blow up a tanker truck at the airport with a homemade bomb. According to the authorities, these most violent cells are part of a movement that on October 31, one day after the elections, set up in front of the barracks to demand a coup that would prevent Lula’s inauguration and keep Bolsonaro in power.
But if there are fears, there will also be a great party. Some are expected 300,000 people for a concert that will start early to finish at dawn on Monday, with fifty popular artists.
Bolsonaro will not be present
The far-right leader, who still does not recognize Lula’s victory, finished discouraging the most radical this Friday, when he decided to leave the country and go to Orlando (United States)where, according to his relatives, he intends to stay for about three months.
(Read: Bolsonaro says goodbye in tears: “Battles are lost, but not the war”)
After 60 days of almost absolute silence, he asked his followers to maintain a strong opposition to Lula’s “communism” and traveled on a presidential plane amid harsh criticism from all political sectors.
In the opposition until now, his departure was considered another example of the authoritarianism that this captain of the Army reserve, defender of the dictatorships that prevailed in Latin America half a century ago, imprinted on his mandate. The only practical consequence of what many describe as a “flight” will be that Bolsonaro will break the tradition of handing over the presidential sash to his successor, who will possibly receive it from a group of people who will symbolize the “diversity of democratic Brazil”according to sources from Lula’s team.
The future of the extreme right is now uncertain, although that movement will retain relative strength in the new parliamentalso elected in October and who will take office next February, with a clear conservative majority, although more moderate than Bolsonarismo.
The largest foreign representation
Lula’s return to power has generated great expectations in the world and his inauguration will have the largest foreign representation seen to date in an investiture in Brazil, the only country in which the leaders take office on such an uncomfortable date as the January 1.
There will be a total of delegations from fifty countries that include twenty heads of State and Government, headed by the King of Spain and the leaders of Argentina, Bolivia, Colombia, Chile, Ecuador, Paraguay, Uruguay, as well as the presidents of Germany and Portugal. In the case of Uruguay, and in what many considered in Brazil an “example of democracy”, the conservative president Luis Lacalle Pou will travel to Brasilia together with his predecessors José ‘Pepe’ Mujica and Julio María Sanguinetti.
The vast majority of the foreign delegations will arrive in the Brazilian capital on Sunday morning, and an as yet unconfirmed number of leaders will remain until Monday, when Lula will receive them in separate audiences on what will be his first effective day in office.
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