Lula smears Venezuelan opposition, compares it to Bolsonaro’s putschism

President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva met with Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez on Wednesday and used the event to send several foreign policy messages. 

He told reporters that Venezuela “knows” it must hold “democratic” elections, which he hopes will convince the U.S. to end sanctions against the country. Lula added that he “hopes” the Venezuelan opposition will not act like former far-right President Jair Bolsonaro and reject the election results.

Mr. Bolsonaro has been accused of plotting a coup in Brazil after losing the 2022 presidential race, the result of which he has never acknowledged. The opposition in Venezuela, meanwhile, has protested a series of elections that have been neither free nor fair.

Yesterday, Venezuela’s autocratic government announced it would hold presidential elections on July 28, months earlier than expected.

In October, Nicolás Maduro’s government and the Venezuelan opposition signed an agreement on the upcoming elections. The text was signed in Barbados, with Norway acting as the main mediator. A few months before the agreement was signed, the leading opposition candidate, María Corina Machado, had already been ruled ineligible to run by Venezuela’s comptroller general, a Maduro ally.

Lula touched on this incident during Wednesday’s press conference, noting that he himself had been barred from running in the presidential election of 2018, while he was in jail for later-quashed corruption charges. “Instead of crying about it, I nominated another candidate who disputed the elections,” the president said.

In another move against dissent, Mr. Maduro’s regime expelled the United Nations human rights office from Caracas. More recently, the Venezuelan government has faced suspicions of a possible connection to the murder of a political opponent living in exile in Chile. (Our Latin America Weekly newsletter explained the affair.)

At today’s press conference, Lula also said that “Guernica, by the genius Pablo Picasso, synthesizes the outrage against the horror and destruction caused by all wars and conflicts, and must inspire the international community.” 

Lula has come under fire for his recent comments on Israel’s war in Gaza, which he has described as tantamount to genocide and compared to the horrors of the Holocaust. His remarks have sparked culture wars in Brazil, and the government has attributed a recent drop in the president’s popularity to Lula’s Israel-Gaza debacle.

The Brazilian president also used the meeting with the Spanish head of government to reiterate his longstanding call for reform of the United Nations Security Council and to call for more taxation of the “super-rich,” a proposal recently presented by Brazil at the G20 meeting of finance ministers.

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