To be honest, I was shocked when he said that. Lula, and the Worker’s Party as a whole, usually shy away from name-dropping Communism, let alone openly praising it.
Lula is usually worried with having support from the right-leaning Congress, and honestly, he needs that support to be allowed to do anything as president, and openly saying what he said is sure to get him a lot of criticism.
Still, it was a nice surprise to hear that.
You clearly don’t know Brazilian politics, but I already explained how unusual that is for a leftist politician like Lula who tries to appear moderate to appease the right. He straight up said he was very happy because for the first time ever, the supreme court will have a communist minister (appointed by him). Dino being a communist was a fact that only the opposition was using, to attack him and his appointment for the supreme court.
“They accuse us of being communists, as if we would be offended by that. We are not offended.”
“We would be offended if they called us Nazis, neofascists, terrorists. But never a communist, a socialist. That doesn’t offend us. It makes us proud many times.”
My only point is that many people have name-dropped communism in history, and many of these people were counterrevolutionaries, reactionaries, utopians, liberals, social-democrats etc.
I don’t care that Lula thinks a communist is cool. I care whether Lula is communist, whether Lula belongs to a revolutionary communist party, whether the party is firmly linked with the masses and is actively fighting for the concerns of the masses — I could keep going but these things are not true. But yes it is true that Lula praised a communist. So did Pol Pot.
