In the press – Investiture in Brazil: “Old Lula is back”

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In the headlines, the investiture, Sunday January 1, of the new president of Brazil, Lula da Silva, back for a third term, twelve years after leaving power.

Luis Inacio Lula da Silva has pledged to “rebuild” Brazil and reconcile his compatriots. The daily Folha de Sao Paulo publishes in one the photo of the successor of Jair Bolsonaro, who was absent from the ceremonies, in the company of 8 Brazilians chosen to symbolically replace the former head of state. Among them, a cook, a metalworker – Lula’s former job – a 10-year-old boy or the Indian chef Raoni, to embody the diversity but also the unity of Brazil.

Another daily, same symbolic photo. According to O Estado de Sao Paulothe new president placed the fight against inequality at the heart of his speech and promised “major intervention” by the state in the economy, in particular via the reinstatement of the policy against deforestation and the Fund for the Amazon.

The weekly Veja salutes “the courageous investiture of Lula”, predicting that “if he succeeds in his third term, the former worker will become the most important politician in the history of Latin America”. “Today, writes the Brazilian magazine, the (country) is reborn in the world after becoming a pariah under Bolsonaro, and Lula, if it has a good government – ​​if it fights against inequalities, deforestation and revives the economy, will become the greatest politician that Brazil has ever known”.

O Globo, the Rio daily, also evokes the idea of ​​Lula having an appointment with his destiny, but is much more circumspect: “Fate now offers Lula a chance to end his political life in a different way of the one who led him to prison”. “Succeeding in embodying an alternative against a perverse and incompetent Bolsonaro was not very difficult, and the reality is that Lula only owes his victory to the fact of having been the only one capable of bringing together a majority, without his party is in the majority and without the voters who voted for him having overcome their distrust of him”, because of the corruption cases in which he was involved.

For everyday Estadao, the mass is said: “Old Lula is back”. The newspaper is delighted that his inauguration took place without incident, a sign, according to him, that “democracy has returned” to Brazil. But he believes that his program still expresses “the same outdated vision of the state”. A “retrograde” vision, where “society, economy and culture seem to be reduced to appendages of an all-powerful state”.

On the front page, also, the death, Saturday, December 31, of Pope Benedict XVI, at the age of 95. The photo of the remains of the former sovereign pontiff exhibited in the chapel of the Mater Ecclesiae Monastery, his last residence in the Vatican, is on the front page of La Stampawhich evokes the disappearance of a pope “misunderstood but not reactionary”, contrary to the opinion of his detractors, including within the Catholic community.

“The Last Curator”: La Repubblica announces that the funeral of Benedict VXI will take place on Thursday 5 January, and that nearly 60,000 people are expected in Rome to attend the funeral of this “enigmatic” pope, presented as “a man who carried within him tensions and contradictions of contemporary Catholicism”, a “conservative theologian who paved the way for the election of a reformist successor”, Pope Francis.

Benedict XVI, “pope and theologian”, simply titles The cross. The French Christian newspaper looks back at length on its eight years of pontificate, marked by the “doctrinal firmness” of Benedict XVI and his renunciation in 2013. The occasion, for The cross, to regret “the caricature of a ‘Panzerkardinal’ lost in the wrong century”.

More virulently, Le Figaro protests against the way in which the former pope would have been “slandered” for having acquitted himself “with fidelity of the task assigned to him by John Paul II: to uphold the deposit of the Catholic faith taken by storm, according to him, by European and Latin American theologians, notably via liberation theology”.

Many criticisms, too, in France, after the presentation, on Saturday, of his wishes, by Emmanuel Macron – a speech during which the president notably confirmed his desire to carry out the pension reform. While the temperatures measured by Météo France exceeded, on the same day, the seasonal norms by more than 8 degrees, Release regrets that Emmanuel Macron, sketched on the front page in tap shoes and swimming shorts by the designer Coco, preferred “to pass on his essential message on pensions, by putting at the heart of his speech, until saturation, the value ‘work’ “. A speech which confirms, according to Libé, that “the ideological software which serves as a guide (to the president) is of a sadly classic invoice”, “not up to the challenges which are in front of us”.

Opinion underlines the way in which the president praised “the unity of the country”, in the face of a reform “which deeply divides the French”, “at the risk of appearing disconnected from reality”. The plan to postpone the retirement age does not please at all, in any case, Humanitywhich sees the president urging the French to “work old”, failing to make them work better, or for better wages.

We don’t leave each other on this. Before saying see you tomorrow, I suggest you throw an eyelash at the beautiful front page of Humanity. “Happy New Year everyone, headlines the newspaper, for its readers, but also for our planet. Wishes of hope, too, from the newspaper The cross from the Pic du Midi de Bigorre, in the Hautes-Pyrénées. The daily newspapers therefore welcome you to 2023, and I join them in wishing you a very happy new year, wherever you are in the world.

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