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  How far can Lula's stardust scatter? | Richard Bourne |
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The president of Brazil stands for democracy, and for the poor.
These are still valuable qualities in the 21st centuryPresident Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil, who has received the Chatham House prize for 2009 , is one of the few world politicians to have ridden out the global economic crisis with an enhanced reputation.
In April he was congratulated by Barack Obama at the Summit of the Americas as the most popular politician on the planet, and he has had approval ratings of over 80%.The Chatham House award may not be the greatest thing since sliced bread; Lula was voted for by members ahead of the prince who is foreign minister of Saudi Arabia, and the president of Liberia.
But he deserves to be saluted not only for the economic management of his government - enormously helped by the discovery of deepwater oil fields, and the international commodities boom - but for the role he has played in consolidating democracy in his country.
For over 20 years, from 1964 onwards, Brazil was a military dictatorship.He has represented the democratic impulse since his days as a strike leader in the 1970s, he later set up the Workers Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores) at the start of the 1980s.
He ran three times for president before getting elected in 2002, and has ruled out altering the constitution to permit a third four-year term, despite calls from "friends" who know his personal popularity is greater than his party's.Elsewhere, the undemocratic impulse is still alive and well.
In the Commonwealth, Uganda's president Yoweri Museveni - outgoing chair of an association that advertises democracy - has altered the constitution so that he can stay in office.
In Venezuela, president Chávez has done the same, waving the banner of radical Bolivarian socialism.If all power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely, the rotational principle remains central to the practice of democracy.
In fact Brazil's 1988 constitution laid down a single term for the president, and Lula opposed President Fernando Henrique Cardoso when he altered it to permit two terms.And not everything is splendidly democratic in Brazil.
Shortly after Lula was re-elected in 2006 there was an enormous row when congressmen sought to virtually double their emoluments - a project only reined in by the public outcry.
Corruption scandals, including a deal in which small, unprincipled and rapacious parties were put on the government payroll, nearly prevented Lula's re-election.
While his PT party has recovered slightly from its ethical disasters, he has had to rule by means of a series of coalitions, and the pork-barrel business of politics in a large, federal country has not greatly altered.But Lula's popularity rests not only on his famously dynamic personality, but on his efforts to reduce the huge inequalities in Brazil, and his success in putting the country on the world map.
Even in his first term, experts were pointing out that increases in the minimum salary and in the Fome Zero (Zero Hunger) programme were reducing poverty and hunger for the poorest.
His own experience as a poor northeastern boy in a dysfunctional family, who migrated to the industrial area around Sao Paulo, had given him a political determination quite unusual in the modern world.Further his country, famously described as the "country of tomorrow" in the 1940s, seems actually to have arrived.
The Bric grouping of Brazil, Russia, India and China beloved of emerging market analysts may conceal many differences, but the Brazilian currency has strengthened, Lula was standing at Obama's right hand in official photos of the Pittsburgh G20 summit, and his active lobbying as a football and sports fan has yielded the football World Cup in 2014 and the Rio Olympics in 2016.However no amount of presidential verve can wish away Brazil's immense problems - social, environmental and economic.
Crime remains horrendous; there aren't many countries where gangsters shoot down a police helicopter, as happened in Rio recently, and human rights are routinely ignored in spite of an active NGO network and vibrant media.And can Lula, who is working hard on it, mastermind his succession? Some say that he could get a broomstick elected.
Others that his stardust is so personal to himself, that it will not scatter easily to others.
His favourite has been Dilma Rousseff, a one-time guerrilla who has been managing the presidential office, but who has had a brush with cancer.
Presidential elections will be held in 2010, and Brazilian politicos, working in a still fluid party system with four large parties and many others, are already manoeuvring the pieces at state level.It is right that Chatham House is honouring Lula.
He stands for democracy, and for the worst-off.
These are still valuable qualities in the 21st century.
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