Can Brazils president continue to appeal to Porto Alegre as well as Davos?
PERHAPS no other world leader could have pulled off the feat achieved last weekend by Brazil’s new president, Luiz Incio Lula da Silva. First, an ebullient crowd of 75,000 at the World Social Forum, a global gathering of the radical left, hailed him as its leader. He provides hope not only to his own people but to struggling people all over the world, said Thomas De Castro, a Canadian trade unionist, as he listened to Lula at the forum in Porto Alegre, a tidy state capital in southern Brazil. Then Lula flew directly to Davos, the Swiss town that hosts the World Economic Forum. There, his speech was greeted ecstatically by the assembled businessmen and bankers who symbolise everything that the Porto Alegre event was set up two years ago to oppose. A month into his term, Lula does not discourage the idea that his Brazil will provide the world with a new paradigm. In Porto Alegre, he cited several Latin neighbours which, he claimed, have high expectations of his government. In Davos, he c
