THERE WAS a sporting theme as President Michael D Higgins kicked-off his visit to Brazil by presenting the country’s former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva with an Irish football jersey.
Handing it over he emphasised that the top was not to be confused with that of local club Palmeiras, the green-clad rival of the football-mad Lula’s beloved Corinthians team.
Mr Higgins told the former metal worker who became Brazil’s first left-wing president that he had already quoted him on the first stage of his tour in Chile late last week.
There he cited his 2009 speech at the United Nations in which Mr da Silva said the global economic crisis was not the result of big banks but of “big dogmas”.
In return Mr da Silva gave the president a box set of CDs by Chico Buarque, the famous Brazilian singer whose subtle criticisms of the country’s former military dictatorship evaded the censors and made him a huge star.
Though almost two years out of power and having recently suffered from throat cancer, Mr da Silva showed his enduring political powers when in local elections on Sunday he managed to lift his little known education minister, Fernando Haddad, into the second round of the contest to become mayor of São Paulo, the southern hemisphere’s biggest city.
Mr Haddad started the race with just 3 per cent in the polls and many in Lula’s Workers Party resisted the former president’s determination to select him as the party’s candidate.
Now he faces a run-off round against José Serra, who lost the 2002 presidential election to Mr da Silva and was beaten again by his protege, Dilma Rousseff, in 2010’s contest.
But in Brazil’s third city of Belo Horizonte Lula’s backing was not enough to see Patrus Ananias force a second round against incumbent mayor Marcio Lacerda. Mr Ananias was the architect of the keystone social programme of the Lula administration, Bolsa Família (Family Purse) and was strongly supported by the former president and his successor.
But he came up short against Mr Lacerda who had the backing of Aécio Neves, the opposition senator most likely to face President Rousseff in 2014’s presidential election.
