Silva’s mettle: Brazil’s newish president

Hello and welcome to The Intelligence from The Economist. In London, I'm Jason Palmer.

And in New York, I'm Jon Fassman. Every weekday, we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

America's armed forces are struggling to get recruits. The numbers are as bad as they've been in 50 years, thanks to a complex mix of post-pandemic effects and the country's tight job market, American might might be slipping.

And Joseph Ratzinger was born in a small Bavarian town 95 years ago. He entered the seminary as a young man, eventually becoming Benedict XVI, the first pope to resign in over 600 years. Our obituaries editor reflects on his life and legacy. But first. On Sunday, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, or Lula as he's known, was sworn in as president of Brazil for the third time. —promover o bem geral do povo brasileiro, sustentar a união, a integridade e a independência do Brasil. In a break with inaugural tradition, his predecessor was not there to mark the handover. Jair Bolsonaro, the outgoing right-wing populist, never conceded defeat in the election. He elected to fly to Florida instead. Lula wasted no time in laying waste to his record. [SPEAKING PORTUGUESE] He told the country that Bolsonaro and his policies had wreaked national destruction, destruction that he now has the job of cleaning up.

It's been busy right from the start. Right when he came into office, he passed a bunch of decrees that reverted some of the decrees that were passed by Bolsonaro.

Sarah Maslin is The Economist's Brazil correspondent.

He made it more difficult for people to buy certain kinds of weapons and put a temporary stop on the opening of new gun clubs. He passed several decrees to try to show his seriousness of reducing deforestation in the Amazon. Bolsonaro was really blasé about the climate crisis, and illegal miners and loggers were among his supporters. So Lula passed a decree that reorganized some environmental bodies and another one that reverts a plan to eventually legalize wildcat mining in the Amazon rainforest. Finally, Lula signaled an economic change of direction as well. He shut down an ongoing study about the viability of privatizing Petrobras, the state-owned oil company, and several other other state enterprises, which sent markets tumbling in the day after he took office.

So it sounds like he's been pretty busy since he took office. Let's wind back for a moment. Remind us how he came to be president again.

Well, it's been a really remarkable rise and fall and rise again. January 1st, 2023 was exactly 20 years after Lula was first inaugurated in 2003. Lula's a former union organizer and a founder of the left-wing Workers' Party, or PT. He left office in 2010 with an 83% approval rating. But from 2018 to 2019, he spent 18 months in jail on corruption charges as part of the whole Lava Jato, or Car Wash, anti-corruption investigation. Those charges were later annulled, which allowed him to run again. And then in October beat Jair Bolsonaro to the presidency in the closest election Brazil has had since its return to democracy in the 1980s.

So Sarah, how do ordinary Brazilians feel about having him back?

Well, I was in Brasília, the capital, for the inauguration on Sunday. The city was a sea of red, the color of Lula's Workers' Party. People were extremely excited. They felt this sense of relief after the government of Bolsonaro. One man told me he was really worried about Brazil's democracy under Bolsonaro, who was constantly fighting with the Supreme Court and other institutions, and praised Brazil's military dictatorship. Another woman had come all the way from the northeastern state of Paraíba, which is a region of Brazil that really benefited from the social programs during Lula's first term. But my colleague Carolina also talked to a woman from Brasília who was thrilled about Lula, but had stopped talking with her relatives who were Bolsonaro fans, which is pretty typical for Brazil. We actually spent the morning of the inauguration outside army headquarters, where hundreds of Bolsonaro fans have been camped out ever since the election and were holding out hope in the final hours before Lula was inaugurated that there would be some kind of coup that would keep him from taking office. Their hopes were dashed in the end, though. And in both of Lula's speeches, he emphasized that he's going to try to govern for all Brazilians, but especially for poor people. He said it's not fair or right to ask for patience for people who are hungry, and that's his first priority going into his government.

And will he be able to do that? I mean, what does the country look like as he takes over?

Well, Lula has a really daunting task ahead because Brazil's economy is really struggling. Growth is expected to be around 2.9% in 2022, thanks to copious pre-election stimulus spending, but it's expected to fall to just around 1% in 2023. Inflation peaked at 12% in April. It's fallen now to around 6%. But the number of Brazilians who don't get enough to eat has risen from around 6% before Bolsonaro took office in 2019 to 16%. And poor people are really feeling the effects of the pandemic, inflation, the war with Ukraine. Bolsonaro's government promised a whole bunch of liberal economic reforms to boost growth. But apart from a pensions reform at the beginning of his government, He really failed to enact most of them. So Lula's inheriting a country with high inflation, weak growth, and a population that's really pretty desperate for positive change.

So given the state of the country, how much of his vision do you think he'll be able to realize? Well, Lula's really ambitious.

He wants to reduce poverty by revamping various big social programs started under his previous administration. These include a cash transfer scheme called Bolsa Família, or Family Fund, a subsidized housing program called My House, My Life, and public works projects to provide jobs and upgrade Brazil's crumbling infrastructure, which he hopes is going to also end up boosting growth. But because of the fiscal crunch that Brazil finds itself in and the tough external conditions, it's a very different Brazil than the one Lula took over in 2003. Which was headed into a commodity boom.

And so that's the economics. What about the politics? What does his coalition look like? Does he have the political muscle to get his program up and running?

Well, Lula basically spent the transition doing all sorts of elaborate horse trading with the 20 or so parties in Congress to build a coalition. So basically, parties agree to back him in Congress in exchange for ministries. He's built this coalition with a bunch of opportunistic center-right parties that will probably back him on many of his efforts to boost growth, but aren't going to champion leftist social causes. And this coalition that Lula is building is going to be inherently unstable. Brazilian presidents' strength in Congress depends really heavily on their popularity, which in turn depends on the economy. And so if he doesn't act quickly, he risks losing both the chance to pass reforms for economic growth, but also his entire political stability and coalition in Congress as well.

And so ultimately, Sarah, what do you think his presidency is going to look like given those challenges?

Well, I think in some areas like the environment, health, and education, Lula's presidency is going to be a radical shift. These were areas that were totally gutted by Bolsonaro. On the economic front, I think there are probably reasons to be more wary. It's not clear yet that Lula understands that big spending of the kind when he was last president is the solution for Brazil's current problems. And even if he takes on the kind of big structural reforms that are needed, it's not clear that he's going to have the support in Congress to push them through. So I think the next next 2 months are going to be really telling.

All right, Sarah, thanks so much for joining us today. Thank you.

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Late in the Vietnam War, America's government stopped drafting forcing citizens to serve in the country's armed forces. Since then, they've been staffed by professionals who volunteer to serve. But lately, those volunteers have been getting harder to find.

Well, the US Army has reported some dramatically bad numbers for recruitment for the fiscal year 2022, which ended just at the end of September.

Ben Sutherland writes about defense and technology for The Economist.

It's at least 15,000 recruits short. It wanted to have 60,000 recruits and it got about 45,000. So that's pretty dramatic. The numbers for the Navy and Air Force were not quite as bad, but they also fell short. Observers are saying that the outlook for the coming year is going to be just as bad, or in the case of the Navy and Air Force, probably worse. The U.S. Army's recruitment numbers haven't been this bad since 1973. That was during the Vietnam War. That's when the draft ended.

So what will those shortfalls actually mean for the Army, for the military as a whole?

The Army may very well need to call up members of the National Guard and Army Reserve and put them onto full-time active duty. The Secretary of the Army, Christine Wormuth, has also said that some restructuring may need to take place, which would mean shutting down certain units in the US Army. So that's troubling. It's also interesting that the Heritage Foundation, which is a Washington, D.C. think tank, has recently rated the U.S. military's strength as, quote, weak. That's an index that the Heritage Foundation puts out every year, and that is the first time in the index's 9-year history that a rating that bad was given.

And so what is it that officials think is behind this shortfall?

Well, there's a number of things. One of the most obvious is that the job market is red hot, so there's a lot of competition with companies which have been raising wages. They're signing bonuses for a number of jobs. So that's part of it. I guess the effects of the pandemic are also still being shown. So for starters, the pandemic reduced face-to-face recruiting in schools, and that's a very important way for the military to get recruits. One of the public affairs officials with the recruiting command in Fort Knox, Kentucky, told me about what he calls a, quote, "disconnect from society," one of the knock-on effects of the pandemic. What one analyst told me is essentially the trauma or the disruption of finishing high school online, missing the prom, missing a graduation ceremony, not having as much time hanging out, physically with your peers has created a sort of paralysis in life decision-making for a lot of young men. So they're not sure if they should leave home, if they should go to college, if they should sign up for the military, what they should do. And so a lot of those decisions are getting delayed. There's also the, the issue of vaccinations. More than a third of Americans aged 18 to 24 have not been vaccinated for COVID. And you need to be vaccinated to sign up for the Army. Now, obviously, some of those people would no doubt, if they decided to go into the Army, would go ahead and take care of that. But there's certainly a certain percentage of them that are disinclined to get vaccinated at this point and are going to see that as a negative. So that's another issue.

So in one way or another, the COVID-19 pandemic is to blame for these declines.

Well, there's another factor too, which is the pandemic has hurt academic standards. People have had a hard time studying online, and so academic scores have dropped. That's reduced the number of people who've received a sufficient score on the Armed Forces standardized test in order to join. Another issue is that the number of Americans who are willing to serve in the military has been slipping, and it has fallen now to a troubling 9%, officials say.

And why might that be, that that fraction of people who even want to do this is dropping?

That's a very good question. One thing that analysts point to is the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan last year, the images of the military having difficulty getting its people out of the country as it was taken over by the Taliban. Certainly hurt the military's image. Another explanation would be the polarization of politics. You've got people on the left who feel that the U.S. military is an instrument of racist, white supremacy imperialism. And you've got people on the right who feel that the military has been taken over by wokeism. That latter belief was reinforced by public comments made by Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who said he wanted to understand, quote, white rage. Now, what's not clear is if the problem is more discouraging those of a leftward bent or those with a more conservative bent from joining. We don't know. That's an area for more research, but there's just no good studies that have been done to clarify just how much of a problem that is on each side.

So what is the military to do? What can, what should be done to turn these declines around?

One thing the military is doing is it's sharply stepping up outreach in schools. It is increasing signing bonuses, in some cases $35,000, even $50,000 for certain positions that it wants to fill. It is allowing recruits to sign up with shorter contracts. 4 years is the typical initial contract, and in some cases, people are being allowed to sign up for 2 years. And it's also allowing a lot of new recruits to choose their first duty location. So that's one package of reforms the military is doing. I'd say that there's a huge wildcard, and that is how the war in Ukraine may or may not affect the recruitment crisis. So on one side, you have the war serving as a giant advertisement for the prowess of American weapons systems, that's probably not going to hurt recruitment. But at the same time, observers are saying that the war has not produced a spike in recruitment like the one that we saw after 9/11, simply because even if the U.S. is supplying arms, it's not directly threatened by the fighting in Ukraine. And for the U.S. to get a huge recruitment spike from that war The US would need to be directly involved.

Ben, thanks very much for joining us. Thank you, Jason.

Always a pleasure.

Today there will be a requiem mass for Pope Benedict XVI. It will be presided over by Pope Francis, the first time a pope will have been buried by his successor.

When Benedict XVI became pope in 2005, he had a very hard act to follow.

Anne Rowe is The Economist's obituaries editor.

He came into the papacy after John Paul II, a tremendously popular and vigorous figure in the church. By contrast, he seemed rather weedy and scholarly and grey. And the biggest doubt about him, almost a fear, was that he would be an amazingly fierce doctrinarian. As Cardinal Ratzinger, he had been in charge of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which is an office which rules on doctrine and hands down extremely firm decisions as to what's right and what's wrong and what can be done and what can't within the Church. And in that role, he'd been known as the Rottweiler. There was a lot of worry too about his German-ness. The fact that he had joined the Hitler Youth, or been forced into it really. But he'd also trained for the Wehrmacht, and that Germanness was certainly a worrying side to people. They wondered whether he was going to run the church as a kind of strict and unsmiling headmaster. When he had settled down, however, people discovered there were some very surprising sides to Benedict. He was a softie, especially about cats. He used to collect the stray cats of Rome, and he would go out and stroke them and chat to them in German. He loved playing the piano, and on summer evenings he would play Mozart through the open windows. People would gather around and listen. He didn't care for globetrotting, But globetrotting, unfortunately, is what popes have to do these days. But he had to make these trips, and the trips rather wore him out. And it was this, as much as his growing age and frailty, that inspired him in 2013 to step down from the papacy, which was the first time it had happened for 600 years. He was called on as pope not merely to travel, all over the place, but also to make apologies. One was for antisemitism, which rippled all through the Church down the centuries. He never made an explicit apology for antisemitism. He did go to Jerusalem and he pushed a note between the stones of the Wailing Wall. He was also required to apologize for the pedophile scandal in the Catholic Church. In fact, he bore a particular responsibility for that because when he had been at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, he had been in charge of sorting out what happened when priests were found to have abused children in their parishes, and he had often recommended that priests should simply be moved and should not be defrocked or expelled from the Church. So he had quite a lot to answer for, and he did feel, it is obvious, some compassion, some contrition for what had gone on. He was reduced to tears when he spoke to the victims of paedophile priests in Malta once, and he did make remarks that showed he was sorry, but it was never enough, of course, for people and for many Catholics who had simply been driven from the Church by their horror at what had gone on. He found being in the public eye in the end, really rather a trial. But the fact that he was an academic and someone who was rather shy didn't mean that he was as rigorous in the papacy about doctrine as he had always been as Cardinal Ratzinger. In fact, he laid down again the doctrine that condoms could never be used, even to prevent AIDS, he kept going with the proclamation that homosexuality was a sin. And in all the ways in which the Catholic Church rather dismayed the modern world, and in its complete inflexibility on what should be believed and what should not, he was just as stern a voice in the papacy as he had been in the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. But he managed to combine this strictness with this tenderness. It was a very odd combination. Many people really didn't quite know what to make of Benedict, but those who most supported him and most appreciated him were actually the right-wingers in the Church, the conservatives, who knew that he was a dyed-in-the-wool conservative himself, and therefore found him much more congenial than Francis, who was trying to bring in all sorts of reforms here and there. As Benedict resigned from the papacy and went up the hill to the papal residence there, while Francis stayed in very humble apartments back in the Vatican City. The right-wing supporters of Benedict gathered round him, and he almost had an alternative court there. Benedict became a focus for all the discontents on the right wing of the Church. He himself didn't want this role, and he didn't take it up with any enthusiasm. In fact, he and Francis got on very well. Benedict said he and Francis agreed on almost everything. His death, therefore, was a difficult time for the Church in a sense that one locus of discontent had been removed. He was no longer there as the focus of the conservatives. They could now direct their anger more directly at Francis. But on the other hand, they didn't have someone in the papacy who was representing their interests. So it will be extremely interesting to see in the months and years ahead exactly whether Francis is more liberated for the death of Benedict or whether he becomes even more a victim of those who oppose him.

On Pope Benedict XVI, who has died at the age of 95.

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