From Brazil to South Africa: The power and perils of political charisma
Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva came to prominence in 1979 while leading a metalworkers’ strike under the military dictatorship that oppressed Brazil from 1964 to 1985. He founded the Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT), the Workers’ Party, in 1980, was elected as president in 2003 and re-elected in 2007 to serve a second term that came to an end in 2011. After being imprisoned on bogus charges for 580 days in 2018 and 2019 he defeated Jair Bolsonaro to be re-elected as president in 2022.
Fernando Morais’ Lula, a new biography, opens with all the intensity of the moment before the dénouement in a John le Carré novel. On the afternoon of Thursday 5 April 2018, “a listless workday” at the Lula Institute in São Paulo, news came through that a warrant for Lula’s arrest had been issued.
As the media rushed to the institute on motorcycles and in cars and helicopters crowds of people followed. Some were there to defend Lula and others to gloat at his imminent arrest. The first skirmish left a man unconscious and bleeding from a head wound.
Inside the institute it was quickly decided to take Lula to the metalworkers’ union hall 20 kilometres away. Lula was rushed out of a side door and driven through crowds kicking at the car, hitting it with Brazilian flags on poles, shooting fireworks and chanting “Lula the thief” as helicopters flew dangerously low. The convoy that followed Lula carried João Pedro Stédile and João Paulo Rodrigues, leaders of the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra, the Landless Rural Workers’ Movement.
As the convoy arrived at the union hall hundreds of workers, along with activists, intellectuals and artists, opened a path for Lula. Guilherme Boulos, a philosopher and leader of the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem Teto (MTST), the urban Homeless Workers’ Movement and the Partido Socialismo e Liberdade, the Socialism and Liberty Party, a left-wing off-shoot of the PT, rushed to the hall. On the way he called the leaders of a nearby MTST-aligned land occupation that housed 8 000 families. An assembly was called and a proposal to march to the union hall approved.
It didn’t take long before there were more than 10 000 people outside the hall including “intellectuals, TV and movie actors, nuns, rappers”, Morais writes.
Two days later Lula, wishing to avoid a violent confrontation between the police and his supporters, surrendered and was taken to prison. The trumped-up corruption charges on which he had been jailed were annulled on 8 March 2021.
South African readers of Morais’ biography will, inevitably, be reminded of the evening of 7 July 2021 when Jacob Zuma was, at the last minute, rushed from Nkandla to Estcourt to begin serving a prison sentence.
As in Brazil three years earlier, international media had scrambled to cover a tense situation as a former president was about to be jailed. Like Lula, Zuma had emerged from impoverished rural origins to develop personal charisma and become president through a struggle against an oppressive regime.
Both men had been subject to sustained hostility from white-dominated and stridently Western-aligned media prior to their convictions. In both cases the coalitions that took to the streets against a former president were entirely or largely elite-driven coalitions.
But the scenes outside Zuma’s home in Nkandla were very different to the scenes outside the union hall in São Paulo. The few hundred people gathered in support of Zuma did not include the mass-based organisations of the working class and the poor, most of which were intensely hostile to Zuma.
A good number of the men strutting around in military uniforms and claiming to be veterans of the ANC’s military wing, uMkhonto weSizwe, had clearly been born after the end of apartheid. In the days before Zuma’s deadline to report to the prison in Estcourt they had been wrecking migrant-owned stalls in central Durban hoping to spark another round of xenophobic violence.
Carl Niehaus, a cartoonishly opportunistic and unprincipled person, was, to use a valuable term in the South African lexicon, talking kak to the cameras.
To the extent that there was any appearance of intellectual support for Zuma, it largely came from Andile Mngxitama. Once a promising young intellectual, Mngxitama had degenerated into backing Shepherd Bushiri, the evangelical preacher notorious for badly staged “miracles”. He had also recently repeated conspiracy theories drawn from Trumpian politics in the United States, including the paranoia around 5G and the claim that Bill Gates was using Covid vaccines to insert “tracking devices” into people.
The differences between Lula and Zuma’s records in office were equally glaring. Unlike Lula, Zuma had been grossly corrupt. During Lula’s period in office 40 million people were lifted out of poverty and extreme poverty declined by 50% among many other achievements. Zuma’s record was miserable.
Lula’s charisma was, as John French’s brilliant 2020 biography shows, endowed by a movement and forged through reciprocal relations in concerted actions “based on recognition of a linked fate and shared hope”. It has and continues to summon people, often organised in unions and popular movements that build collective power, into political contestation.
Zuma’s political formation was in the military and intelligence and his charisma is partly that of the man who gives orders and partly that of the man who invites libidinal identification with his disinhibition. It has a strong revanchist element, promises to restore old hierarchies and calls people into acceptance of his authority rather than independent organisation and action.
Unlike older forms of conservativism, it also, much like the charisma of Donald Trump or Jair Bolsonaro, holds the promise of sanction for anti-social behaviour. Zuma’s charisma is also regionally concentrated and, as the results of recent by-elections in KwaZulu-Natal and his failure to fill the Moses Mabhida Stadium show, in decline.
Both men are outsiders — born poor, denied formal education and reviled by old elites. But Lula’s charisma is harnessed to a democratic project of expanding social inclusion, in contrast, Zuma’s charisma speaks in the name of the people while being weaponised by a predatory counter-elite.
There was a moment when South Africa and Brazil seemed to some to be set on similar paths. In both countries strikes were a significant turning point in struggles against oppressive regimes. In South Africa, the Durban strikes in 1973 opened the way to the development of popular counter-power in the country, popular power that would grow to the point of forcing the state into a corner.
In Brazil, the strikes by metalworkers near São Paulo in 1979 marked the beginning of the end of the military dictatorship.
A direct connection between these two national struggles developed when, in 1971, Steve Biko set up workshops to train activists in the pedagogic methods developed by Paulo Freire in Brazil. Freire’s ideas, grounded in a dialogical approach to education that encourages critical thinking, reflection and active participation, were later brought into thinking about praxis in the trade union movement, and then the United Democratic Front.
These ideas, premised on mutual respect, were an important element of the thinking about praxis that enabled many university-trained intellectuals in the 1970s and 1980s to productively engage popular movements and struggles.
Much of this has eroded, and South Africa lacks the scale, depth and intensity of popular organisation seen in Brazil. The left remains constrained — either by its subordination to elite nationalism or its own dogmatism, sectarianism, high tolerance for paranoia and conspiracy theory and occasional thuggery.
There are many valuable criticisms of Lula and his party. As things stand, the deep political divisions in Brazil and a hostile Congress leave little room for his gift for forging broad coalitions to flourish. Expectations for his current term must be tempered.
Nonetheless, the contrast between Lula and Zuma highlights just how much was lost when the work of building popular democratic power was largely abandoned in South Africa.
Richard Pithouse is a distinguished research fellow at the Global Centre for Advanced Studies in Dublin and New York, an international research scholar at the University of Connecticut and an extraordinary professor at the University of the Western Cape.