“I’m a gaffe machine," U.S. President Joe Biden once admitted. "But my God what a wonderful thing compared to a guy who can't tell the truth." The 'guy' was Donald Trump, the then incumbent seeking reelection and –– if one takes the Washington Post tally as a measure –– a certified lie machine: 30,573 misleading or false claims during his administration or an average of 21 such claims a day.
The international press and analysts frequently compared the previous Brazilian president, Jair Bolsonaro, to Trump. Not only both of them played the authoritarian card liberally, but Bolsonaro also had a funny way with the notion of truth: 6,685 false or misleading claims in four years or 4.58 alternative facts per day, according to fact-checking site Aos Fatos –– hardly a match to the American record but a decent score, nonetheless.
Luis Inacio Lula da Silva, the current president of Brazil, is more like a Joe. The two of them are not above a falsehood –– no politician is –– but their specialty is the awkward, the poorly phrased quip, the confounding off-script quote that sends their staff scrambling, you know, the gaffe. Those perceived blunders come from improvisation, which is intrinsic to their personas: no-nonsense men of the people with a dash of bravado, who don't shy away from impulse ('not phony') even if it risks revealing entrenched common-sense prejudices.
From Silvio Berlusconi to Evo Morales, many leaders of diverse plumage relied on and fell victim to the unfiltered improv. It is not to say this is typical of populist rulers. FDR crafted his speeches carefully. For Getulio Vargas, the 1930s Brazilian dictator that returned to power as a democratically elected president in the 1940s, improvisation was an exception. Not for Biden and Da Silva, who stick to the time-honored instinctive tradition no matter what. Trump and Bolsonaro flipped this tradition on its head and weaponized it: the more they offend, the more successful they are –– they created a different set of standards for themselves. Calling them old or crazy for their most outrageous one-liners has proved innocuous. Against these two, Biden and Lula, as the Brazilian president is widely known, feel antiquated. This in turn helps to explain their popularity. They exude nostalgia for more innocent, better times, even if these times are a memory construct.
Lula, made a career as a union leader that usually spoke impromptu, and he took this habit to the presidential seat. "As usual, I've got a written speech following the good protocol of the presidency, but also, as usual, I've got this crazy itch to improvise," he would tell an amused audience in 2005. It is his way "to demonstrate he is concerned with being understood by the poor," Paraiba State University professor Ada Guedes Bezerra explained.
"Biden is plain-spoken — sometimes to a fault," Timothy Noah wrote in The New Republic in 2012. The New York Times' Frank Bruni has an inspired name for it: "unlacquered oratory." During the 2020 campaign trail in Iowa, deep in Trump country, a man called Biden “old” and accused him of abusing his political power to help his son. "You're a damned liar," Biden lashed back. "And do you wanna check my shape? Let's do push-ups together." Punditry scoffed; the packed room applauded.
Biden's gaffes –– so colorful, so typical, so him –– are called Bidenisms. Likewise, Lula has got his Lulisms. Evidence of their kinship abounds. Consider the racially charged faux pas, for instance.
In 2003, at the beginning of his first term as president, Lula took a diplomatic tour across Africa. One of the main stops was Windhoek, the capital of Namibia, which had gotten rid of South African rule and Afrikaner apartheid –– if not its architectural heritage –– barely a decade earlier. Next to Sam Nujoma, the Namibian president, Lula felt the ad-lib itch. "Those who arrive at Windhoek don't seem to be in an African country," he started, signaling the trainwreck right around his next sentence. "Few cities in the world are so clean, so architectonically beautiful as this or have such extraordinary people like this city." Damage control went into high gear simultaneously: Sergio Ferreira, the president's aide, translated "clean" as "beautiful" for the native audience. The rest of the Brazilian entourage could only remain shocked in place.
In 2007, when Biden was just one of the hopefuls fighting for the Democrat presidential nomination, he liked to jibe at his opponents. One of them was one-term Senator Barack Obama, who heard this backhanded compliment: "I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy," he said. "I mean, that's a storybook, man." (Notice how "clean" coats both men's quotes.) Later, he went to Jon Stewart's The Daily Show to clarify his semantics.
Women have also figured prominently in their ill-advised repertoire. Biden used to be too warm when he met them. Lula had kind words. In 2010, he remarked that a woman should be "submissive" to her husband "not because of a plate with food" but out of love. During his 2022 campaign, he meant to celebrate the anniversary of an anti-domestic violence law when he said that those who wished to beat a woman should do so "elsewhere but not in your homes or in Brazil because we can't tolerate this anymore."
And so on and on. The two presidents could write a compilation full of such entries. At around the letter F for Foreign Policy, the gaffes take a global stage. Risks increase exponentially along with staff's worries and efforts. Here, mistakes seem to emerge from some unease with the diplomatic ways, which are built on careful wording. Biden and Lula are constantly running afoul of these unwritten rules.
From Taiwan to Ukraine
In May 2022, Biden appeared to ignore decades of strategic ambiguity when he answered a question about whether the U.S. would defend Taiwan militarily in case of a Chinese attack. "Yes, that's the commitment we made," he replied. White House officials rushed to explain that the American stance towards Taiwan had not shifted. A similar sequence of events had already unfolded in October 2021, only now Biden was in Asia paying a visit to the Japanese prime minister, so his words carried more weight. They certainly caused some saber-rattling from China.
On both occasions, White House officials pointed out strategic ambiguity and the One China position –– stated in the 1982 US-China Communiqué –– remained firmly in place. After Biden's 2022 statement, they argued that he was referring to the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act, which declares that "the United States shall make available to Taiwan such defense articles and defense services in such quantity as may be necessary to enable Taiwan to maintain a sufficient self-defense capacity." Supplying weapons and intelligence does not square with the deployment of American troops and equipment in a conflict with China. Biden misinterpreted the provision even if the latest base access agreement with the Philippines in the South China Sea shows that he understood it all too well.
Similarly, the most recent Lulism owes to some misinterpretation. In April 2023, Lula met Xi Jinping in Beijing as part of his travels to bring Brazil back into the diplomatic arena after its right-wing turn under Bolsonaro. On the last day of his visit, Lula offered his view about the Russian invasion of Ukraine: "The United States needs to stop encouraging the war and start talking about peace. The European Union has to start talking peace so that we may convince Putin and Zelenskyy that everybody is interested in peace except, for now, the two of them."
His following answers to journalists were all over the place. After claiming that both Putin and Zelenskyy were interested in waging war, Lula inferred that Ukraine was the aggrieved party when he appealed for allies to "negotiate with the people who can help this country."
On April 15 in Abu Dhabi, he insisted that both countries took the "decision for the conflict."
The both-sides rhetoric is a constant. In May 2022, when he was still a presidential contender, he told Time magazine:
"[Zelenskyy] did want the war. He would have negotiated a little more if he hadn't wanted the war. That's it. I criticized Putin in Mexico City [in March], saying that it was a mistake to invade. But I don't think anyone is trying to help create peace."
Look closely at Brazilian history and Lula's eagerness to appear neutral follows diplomatic tradition even if he mangles it.
One of the main tenets of Brazilian diplomacy is neutrality. It has been thus since the country sent its envoy, Ruy Barbosa, to the second International Peace Conference at The Hague in 1907. Barbosa fiercely advocated international law as the sole arbiter of conflicts between countries. Violence would only be tolerated if these laws were breached. Brazil would take sides in the First World War only after the Germans sunk Brazilian ships in 1917. It was for the same reason that the country officially joined the Allies in the Second World War. Way into the military regime in the 1970s, the generals dropped their automatic alignment with the United States, which had supported the coup, in favor of pragmatism.
Mostly, Brazil has chosen the role of impartial observer or pragmatic mediator –– the Bolsonaro years are the glaring exception to this trend. Today, Lula pursues this role in the same manner he and Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan tried to broker a nuclear deal with Iran in 2010. At that time, Western superpowers criticized the conditions of the deal, which would allow Iran to continue processing uranium. A successful accord would be reached in 2015 sans Brazil or Turkey.
The Ukrainian conflict proved to be a more intractable problem by everyone's admission. In trying to modulate his message according to the immediate audience, Lula finds it hard to strike the balance of a single message. When he visited the United States, he condemned the invasion of Ukraine next to Biden. He adopted the same view at the May 2023 G7 meeting in Hiroshima, Japan, whereas he attempted to please Xi beyond what had been planned in China in April. In Portugal and Spain, he had to dial back his statements to the point of denying he ever said what he said. As appearances go, he risks undermining his diplomats' efforts to gain the trust of both parties.
Today, Brazil is a much minor player among BRICS than in the aughts –– the acronym itself is questionable these days. Russia became a minor partner to China, and South Africa is neglectable. In economic terms, Brazil has fallen way further behind China and India.
Nevertheless, Brazil cannot be dismissed as a neglectable voice in international affairs yet. It is a non-permanent member of the UN’s Security Council. With a vast chunk of the Amazon in its territory, it is a key climate policy player today. The 2025 Conference on Climate Change (COP 30) will be held in Belém, the capital of Pará, one of the main and most troubling Amazonian states. Also, there is no South American policy around Brazil, the region’s economic powerhouse even in recessive times. Finally, Rio de Janeiro will host the next G20 meeting, in 2024. Lula will be there to oversee the event and one only hopes he follows his script.
Celso Amorim, Lula's special foreign policy advisor and former foreign minister, once wrote that Lula could be "beyond reasonable" in his aspiration to solve international conundrums, from a nuclear deal with Iran to a peace deal between Israel and Palestine.
The same hint of naiveté could be detected in Biden's unfiltered statements about the Russia-Ukraine conflict. Backed by intelligence reports in January 2022, he predicted Russia would soon invade Ukraine. Still, as he weighed options, he mentioned the possibility of a "minor incursion" of Russian troops. Protests made him correct course the following day. In March 2022, he told an international audience in Warsaw that Putin "cannot remain in power."
To be fair, the other actors in this drama have not fared much better.
While Lula was in Spain in April 2023, Lu Shaye, China's ambassador to France, remarked that "ex-Soviet countries don't have an effective status in international law." Of all possible responses, the embassy picked the most embarrassing one for a high-ranking diplomat, wolf warrior or not: those were Shaye's "personal views." As for the E.U., economic urges have dampened internal support for Ukraine. Recently, Poland and Hungary banned crucial grain imports from the invaded country due to pressure from their domestic agricultural sector, which was hit hard by low prices.
Despite gaffes and self-interest, negotiations are moving if only at a glacial pace for those suffering on Ukrainian ground.
In February, the Brazilian ambassador voted for the U.N. resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire in Ukraine –– he criticized Western sanctions on Russia, though. The recent visit of Sergey Lavrov, Russia's foreign minister, raised many eyebrows, but Lula had already talked with the Ukrainian president on a videoconference in March. The president stressed he has no scheduled visits to Russia or Ukraine but Amorim traveled to Ukraine in May.
At the beginning of April, Amorim went to Russia to talk to President Vladimir Putin. He also stopped by Paris to meet with French officials before President Emmanuel Macron visited Beijing. Macron, whose remarks contrasted with the wider E.U. position, also champions the peace talk option through China. Xi has finally talked to Zelenskyy, which makes for good optics at least. And Washington starts warming to Chinese involvement in these negotiations.
Meanwhile, diplomacy made sure the most recent Lulisms fade away. The joint statement of the Chinese leader and his Brazilian counterpart is even more generic than the one Xi issued with Macron a week before. Whereas the Chinese Foreign Affairs website mentions a "Ukraine crisis," the Brazilian version refers to "the crisis in Ukraine," using a preposition to absolve the signatories of making any accusation. In the English version description of the visit on both Brazilian and Chinese official pages, there is a call for more countries "to play a constructive role" in solving the crisis. Lula's more controversial answers to journalists during the visit to the UAE are absent from the Brazilian government website.
The economy, estúpido
Ultimately, the Brazilian diplomatic position and Lula’s words must be juggled with economic needs. The war in Ukraine, sanctions on Russia, and logistical bottlenecks threatened to cut fertilizer supply to farmers. Brazil is the biggest buyer of Russian fertilizer (a quarter of its imports). Agribusiness is Brazil's most influential business sector –– a 24.6% share of GDP in 2022.
China became Brazil's largest export market ($89 billion in 2022). The United States comes in a less than half-sized second place ($38 billion), even though it bought Brazilian products in record numbers last year. Lula left Beijing with $15 billion in trade and partnership agreements. When he returned from the United States in February, all he'd gotten was a pledge to join the Amazon Fund, an environmental protection initiative, with a $50 million donation. Under Biden, the United States' international trade game is called reshoring. It will certainly not reverse decades in which Washington's primary strategy towards South America was to take it for granted.
Eventually, the largest South American economy aligns with other nations in the Global South, which has regularly led to clashes with the U.S. and the European Union. Diplomatic spats in the 21st century include the terms of the Free Trade Area of the Americas agreement (FTAA) in 2003 and the WTO Cancún Ministerial agricultural declaration, which led to the creation of the G20 bloc of developing nations. The much-touted EU-Mercosur trade deal signed in 2019 but still not ratified is more of the same raw-materials-for-mirrors routine –– no wonder it is widely known as "cars for beef" –– and puts a lot of constraints on Mercosur countries. As the Financial Times' Alan Beattie put it, "Many emerging markets are in similar positions to Brazil, and their allegiances will be determined as much or more by investment and jobs than global currencies and the Ukraine war."
For all the sheer volume of trade with China, Brazil still plays the same role it has been playing for centuries, that of the glorified commodity exporter. Lula sought agreements to make the relationship with Beijing more sustainable, hoping to curb his country’s relentless process of deindustrialization along the way.
A bolder declaration of economic intent might lure Brazil back into the American fold. Their best bet is supporting the creation of green technology and jobs the South American way. It fits into American plans to boost green energy at home. On April 20, Biden announced he would raise the donation to the Amazon Fund tenfold –– if Congress approves it. That's the beginning of a start.
Concrete economic offers and discreet diplomatic work might quietly push verbal blunders into the background. Lula and Biden's gaffes do not seem to faze their supporters back home either. Whenever they are called out on their errors, they gracefully apologize. However, one should always keep in mind that it takes only the right blow to bring down an edifice of goodwill.
In 1989, Leonel Brizola, a legendary center-left Brazilian politician, gave Lula an enduring nickname. "Politics is the art of eating crows ['swallowing frogs' in Portuguese]," he said. "Now, wouldn't it be fascinating to have the Brazilian elite eat Lula, this bearded frog?"
Although the bearded frog lost that election, his political instincts would hand him victories in 2002, 2006, and 2022. Yet, Brazilians have another saying about frogs that doubles as timely advice to seasoned presidents: frogs die through their mouths.