🧧 Lula courts China — and Congress

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IN THIS ISSUE

• Lula seeks deeper relations with China

• Brazilians want democracy, but are frustrated with it

• Chart of the week: The party system is getting slimmer

Lula makes second Chinese trip since 2023

After attending Victory Day celebrations in Moscow (and saying Brazil “is no one’s backyard” and “has its own interests”), President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is in Beijing for the most anticipated stop of his latest international tour. 

Driving the news. With tensions between the US and China reshaping global trade flows (despite a 90-day cut to US-China tariffs), Lula is betting on closer ties with Beijing to boost Brazil’s economy — and his political capital back home.

State of play. The trip marks Lula’s second to China since returning to office in 2023, and this time he is bringing 11 cabinet ministers, the president of the Senate, and more than 200 business leaders along with him. 

• The Brazilian government expects to announce at least 16 formal agreements during the visit, with a potential 32 more in the works, ranging from infrastructure and energy to biotechnology and e-commerce.

It’s a date. Lula is scheduled to meet with China’s President Xi Jinping on Tuesday. Earlier that day, he will take part in the China-CELAC Forum, alongside the presidents of Colombia and Chile. 

In his words. “China is often portrayed as an enemy of global trade. But in actual fact, it is behaving like a country that wants to do business with those left behind by others for over 30 years,” said Lula, during a business forum in Beijing, where he announced BRL 27 billion (USD 4.7 billion) in new Chinese investments in Brazil.

• “It is important to remember that, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the European Union — a major Brazilian partner — focused on gaining markets in Eastern Europe and reduced investments in Africa and South America.”

👉 Why it matters. Lula’s remarks underscored the disconnect between Western powers’ anxieties over China’s growing footprint in Latin America and their own long-standing neglect of the region.

Self-praise. “[Brazil-China] relations are not a regular relationship, but a relationship of two countries committed to solving the poverty problem that haunted them for so long,” Lula said on Monday, using the opportunity to praise his past administrations for expanding social policies and lifting millions out of poverty.

Highlights. These investments include electric vehicle plants, semiconductor factories in São Paulo and Manaus, and the expansion of logistics networks — particularly railways. Planning Minister Simone Tebet celebrated that China “wants to crisscross Brazil with railroads,” though these investments will likely only seek to better connect Brazilian commodity exports to ports.

Newfound love? Since Donald Trump returned to the US presidency and upended global trade by enacting an erratic tariff policy, Lula has tried to portray himself as a free-trade champion. He told The New Yorker that he comes from a generation “that learned in the 1990s, through Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, that the best thing for the world was globalization and free trade. Products should flow freely across the world.”

• Given his leftist leanings, the reference to Reagan and Thatcher feels off. And given his party’s long embrace of protectionism, Lula’s free-trade conversion is a tough sell.

• More recently, his government moved to tax small individual purchases from foreign marketplaces — a move that hardly screams “products flowing freely across the world.”

Domestic stakes. But Lula’s foreign agenda also serves a domestic purpose. By including Senate President Davi Alcolumbre and other congressional leaders in the trip, the president is using international trips to court congressional leaders by showering them with prestige — knowing that Congress holds the key to crucial policy decisions.

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Brazilians think democracy is at risk and under-performing

As Brazil marks 40 years since the end of its military dictatorship, a new survey shows a paradox at the heart of the country’s democracy: Most Brazilians prefer it to any other form of government — yet more than half say they are dissatisfied with how it functions.

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