I know economics. From my vantage point, [ Varoufakis is ] not a bond villain or Jesus or Inspector Cluseau. He's an idealist as only an academic can afford to be (wink, wink, Jorge). It's this idealism that will be his undoing and unless he discovers his inner sociopath, he will get the blame for the Grexit. He is full of intellectual hubris but he underestimates how truly viscous and evil his opposition is.
I hope I'm wrong, but I think he's fighting monsters and is ill-equipped to do so. Of course if by some miracle he triumphs, he will almost certainly become a monster himself. The world doesn't need another socialist martyr. I hope he doesn't become one.
Lula was a mechanics worker who did not finish high school. When he was elected president he got to manage a financially broken country with humongous public debt. The only bright spot was the new currency (real) which had been created to end hyperflation (more precisely, to exchange it for hyperindebtment) and had managed to lose "only" 50% of its value wrt the dollar in the previous four years. To get elected he had to pledge that he would not default on the public debt, nationalize the public companies that the previous neocon president had
donated to friends privatized, or break the real.
To everybody's surprise he managed to do all that and still do a lot of his party's socialist agenda, such as improve the standard of living of the poorest, raise the minimal pay, open over a 100 new public universities, improve state health care, etc. As a result the economy boomed, he was relected, and he ended with a 80% approval -- including from big industry and commerce sectors. His biggest feat was in 2008, when the international financial crisis struck the world. Instead of following the neocon/IMF recipe -- "cut social spending and give the taxpayers money to the failed private banks" -- he had the state banks to give cheap loans to industries directly, on condition that they did not fire any employees and did not cut pay. As a result Brazil simply did not feel the 2008 crisis at all. Leaders around the world openly praised him for that -- but did not dare imitate him, of course.
Lula's popularity was such that he got to make his successor, the first woman president in our history. She was his Energy minister an totally unknown at the time, bypassing (and upsetting) many party elders. Now, when a strong man picks his successor, the result is usually a disaster, because he usually chooses a yes-man who is actually unable to lead. Although Dilma was not as charismatic as Lula, she turned out to be a strong leader by herself and quite able to navigate the politics without relying on Lula.
Dilma is well-intentioned and capable, but she has however three things going against her. First, she has an economics degree, and therefore does not understand economics as well as Lula did. In particular, she seems unable to understand any goal that cannot be expressed in money terms. For example, Lula's minister of Culture had started a reform of the copyright legislation that would include the notions of fair use and of public domain works. Dilma's minister on the other hand was just a prop for the record industry, and tossed those plans as soon as she took office. Apparently Dilma did not understand that "culture" is not measured by the profit of the publishers...
Dilma also tries to be nice to the media establishment. Lula completely ignored them, never gave exclusive interviews or hobknobbed with media tycoons, stopped reading newspapers after being elected, and even prohibited his ministers from mentioning news in cabinet meetings. He also ordered a redistribution of public advertising budget to favor small local newspapers and radios instead of the big conglomerates. The big media hated him for that and did all they could demonized him, but to no avail. I personally admire him most for that. Dilma however does not seem to have his nerve; she undid this distribution policiy in part, has granted some exclusive interviews, and has appeared on big-time TV, in Oprah-like shows and panels. All in vain, because the media still hates her as much as they hated Lula.
Finally, Dilma (like Obama) does not have the personal public support that Lula had, and therefore she has to cede to her party, and to the allied-but-not-friendly parties in her coalition, in many ways. She had to put up with many thoroughly incompetent ministries because of that.
Besides big media, Dilma also got the hatred of the big banks, because she tried to lower he prime rate to something slightly less than obscene. Media and banks led the campaign against her re-election (and the black bloc vandalism before the World Cup, which they tried hard to sabotage). Yet she managed to barely win a second term, because (thank God) the opposition candidate was a disaster, detested even by his own party.
Besides the media and banking opposition, she has now also has to cope with the OPEC oil dumping and with a record El Niño drought, which will badly hurt the country's finances. Let's hope for the best...
TLDR: Anyway, having lived under both neocon and socialist-Keynesian governments, I am now all for the latter, sorry. I cannot understand how any country could believe that "austerity" is a good thing. I would vote for Lula and Dilma again if I could. I hope that the new Greece government can be as successful as Lula's -- in spite of not being led by a semi-illiterate mechanics worker...
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