Why does Lula spend so much time pandering to his base?

After a turbulent first month in office, dominated by the far-right attacks in Brasília and ongoing revelations about a supposed coup attempt by former President Jair Bolsonaro, a growing number of analysts argue that President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s rhetoric has started deviating too much from his campaign promise to govern as a centrist and lead a big-tent alliance. 

Broadly, the president’s response to the January 8 riots was seen as positive — he was smart to resist the temptation to appoint a general to oversee the federal intervention in the aftermath of the attacks, and ignored calls to sack his conservative Defense Minister (who is accused by his base of being too deferential to the military).

Yet on several other occasions, Lula has embraced a more inflammatory rhetoric that satisfies his base, but is certain to irk those who expect a broad-tent government.

While describing Dilma Rousseff’s impeachment as a “coup” — as Lula did during his recent trip to Uruguay — is certain to elicit cheers in a room full of Workers’ Party stalwarts, it seems at odds with the pledge to lead a democratic alliance that includes leftists, centrists and even moderate conservatives, a sizeable chunk of whom supported removing Ms. Rousseff from office seven years ago.

The timing of the recent announcement by the new head of public broadcaster EBC, that the company should call Ms. Rousseff’s ouster a coup, also seemed odd considering that Brazil’s capital had just seen actual putschist violence, widely considered the most serious attack on Brazil’s democracy...