Lula em Londres e a"Terceira Via"

O Times disse que o presidente brasileiro cativou o público da conferencia da governança progressista com uma análise "populista" da divisão do mundo entre ricos e pobres.

Além dos subsídios agrícolas do primeiro mundo, Lula atacou tb o embargo à Cuba, pediu a criação de um fundo internacional para promover saúde, educação e infraestrutura para os países pobres e disse que acordos internacionais sobre poluição, água e educação básica precisam ser postos em prática com urgência para que a população dos países em desenvolvimento sintam os benefícios ainda nesta geração.

So powerful was the PresidentÂ’s presence that, as soon as he began, hundreds of people attending the Progressive Governance conference scrabbled for their headsets to hear the translation from Portuguese. The applause was loud.

O Guardian publicou dois artigos sobre a conferência, centrados nos rumos da "terceira via", ou melhor, na falta de direção do movimento que deveria unir Blair, Schröder, Clinton, Lula, Mbeki e o presidente da Etiópia, Meles Zenawi. O colunista Roy Hattersley cita o Lula como um exemplo de discrepância ideológica.

Happily, since the last outpouring of "centre-left" enthusiasm, that poor imitation of a philosophy has lost ground. Anthony Giddens decorated his strange little book, The Third Way and its Critics, with a supportive quotation from Fernando Henrique Cardoso, the former president of Brazil. Giddens' theory, he said, represented a "convergence of progressive ideas". Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, Mr Cardoso's successor, came to the conference and, while he was there, wrote about his "mass leftwing socialist party" helping to "rebuild the trade union movement" and demanding that the state "act decisively to carry out its regulatory function". That is not a view which "converges" with New Labour's determination to "free up" the labour market.

Já o Larry Eliott diz que uma análise sincera da terceira via levaria conclusão de que o capitalismo está doente. Entretanto, os participantes da conferência representam países nos quais os sintomas dessa enfermidade são evidentes.

Gerhard Schröder could speak about how the enthusiasm for deflationary policies has left his country with nearly five million unemployed; Bill Clinton and Tony Blair could explain how they have only avoided the same by pumping so much liquidity into their economies that they are sodden with debt. Helen Clark could wax lyrical about how the Dr Strangeloves of the economics profession took over New Zealand in the 1980s.

Meles Zenawi of Ethiopia knows all about the public spending cuts imposed on his country by IMF austerity programmes. Brazil's president Lula is the man to talk about the three percentage point drop in forest coverage in the Amazon basin in the past decade. Thabo Mbeki presides over a South Africa where the spread of HIV/Aids means life expectancy is 47.7 years, six years less than in the early 1970s. Some success.