With our correspondent in Washington, Guillaume Naudin
It was January 9th. After the attack supporters of former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro against the Parliament in Brasília, Joe Biden called his counterpart Lula to assure him of his solidarity and invite him to Washington.
A month later, Lula arrives. This is the main message of this visit: solidarity between democracies which have known the same type of threats and events.
Beyond this strong symbol, and this shared political message, the two men will also discuss environmental concerns. Lula decided to fight against deforestation by Amazon and against wild gold panning. He is looking for support and hopes to find it from Joe Biden.
This does not prevent some divergences on non-negligible subjects. On the war in Ukraine, Brazil is a supporter of dialogue and refused to send ammunition to kyiv. The United States is also worried about the growing influence of China, now Brazil’s leading partner. Lula will travel to Beijing next month.
Finally, the elephant in the room is called Jair Bolsonaro. Concerned by the investigation into the attack on Brasília, the former far-right president is in the United States. He even applied for a visa to stay longer.
This is Lula’s first official trip outside Latin America since taking office on January 1. The Brazilian president is already there, he arrived Thursday evening in Washington.
After two years of icy relations between former far-right president Jair Bolsonaro and the White House, this trip is an opportunity for Brazil to put itself back on the international scene.
But the objective is also to revive the relationship between the two countries. The fight against the radicalization of the far right is one of the subjects on which the two leaders agree.
The question of the defense of democracy, and then the environmental question, I really think that these are the two subjects of consensus that will be put forward during this visit by Lula to Washington. Afterwards, there is also a subject that is much more tense, which is that of the war in Ukraine, since President Lula intends to present Biden with his “peace club”…
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