On Sunday, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, or Lula, returned as Brazil’s president, marking a significant shift in the country’s politics for the politician who was sent to jail on corruption charges during the last campaign as a candidate as Bolsonaro went on to win the presidential elections.

In 2019, Lula was freed from prison after his convictions were overturned by the Supreme Court, allowing him to run again for office.

On October 30, 2022, Lula won in a tightly contested second-round presidential runoff, winning with 50.9 percent of the vote compared to Bolsonaro’s 49.1 percent, according to Brazil’s Superior Electoral Court.

However, this time around with a strong conservative presence in both chambers of Brazil’s legislature, Lula could face challenges when it comes to pushing through new legislation.

Following the ex-president Jair Bolsonaro’s tenure, on Sunday Lula pledged to lawmakers to rebuild the country, touching upon the importance of democracy that he said triumphed against the “violent threats” he said it had endured.

Lula faces the challenge of changing the fortunes of a politically divided nation, as following his second-round win in October, Bolsonaro supporters nationwide, angry with the election result, blocked roads across Brazil, pushing for the military to intervene.

The move by his supporters followed Bolsonaro ahead of the vote, casting doubt over whether he would respect the election results and questioning the country’s electronic voting system without providing evidence.

Lula also faces the threat of political violence, as on the day of his inauguration authorities detained a man found with a knife and fireworks trying to get close to the event and another recent arrest of an “ideologically” driven Bolsonaro supporter after the man planted explosives to sow “chaos” close to Brasilia’s airport but failed to explode.

Despite everything, the decision of the polls prevailed, reaffirmed Lula on Sunday – as some Bolsonaro supporters demonstrated his inauguration in the capital Brasilia.

In his speech to lawmakers, Lula has touched upon a range of policies from the need to drive small to medium size businesses in Brazil to the country’s need to focus on domestic production and avoid foreign imports.

The former metal worker described his “life mission” in politics to tackle food insecurity and to ensure all Brazilians can eat three square meals.

He also vowed to combat inequality and fight for the rights of women and Black people.

The long-standing leftist politician also called for more dialogue between the government and labor unions to help push through new labor legalization.

On environmental policy, Lula underscored the importance of the green energy transition and the indigenous ministry after the “injustices” the community has faced alongside the need to strive towards zero deforestation.

However, Lula faces the challenge of reversing an economic slump in Brazil, particularly after Bolsonaro has increased social welfare and capped fuel and energy taxes.

Internationally, Lula will have to strive to rebuild foreign relations following Bolsonaro’s hardline policies that left Brazil isolated.

In total Lula has announced 37 ministers in his cabinet from 9 political parties as he has formed close relations with centrists in the process.

However, there has been some criticism concerning gender parity despite an increase in women to his cabinet. In total 26 men hold positions compared to 11 women but his cabinet does black and indigenous representation.

Lula’s former political rival and candidate from the 2006 presidential election, centrist Geraldo Alckmin is now the vice president.

Ex-presidential candidate Simone Tebet, who competed against Lula in the first round of elections in 2022 and backed him in the second round runoff, becomes the Minister of Planning and Budget.

Marina Silva, an Amazon activist, takes over the environmental ministry – a position she had overseen from 2003-2008 until she resigned following a policy disagreement with Lula regarding the policy.

Sonia Guajajara, an indigenous person is Brazil’s first-ever minister for Indigenous peoples. She described her appointment on Twitter as “a historic moment of the principle of reparation in Brazil.” Carlos Favaro, a soybean producer becomes Brazil’s agriculture minister.

Another key position will be held by ex-Sao Paulo Mayor Fernando Haddad, who lost to Bolsonaro during the presidential elections in 2018. He becomes Brazil’s finance minister.

Lula was an influential figure amid the region’s “pink tide” era – when many Latin American countries pivoted politically to the left.

Among Lula’s supporters, he is best remembered for his commodity-driven social-welfare programs that helped raise some 30 million people from poverty.

The former union leader’s return marked a strong return to power for leftist leaders across the region in Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Honduras, Mexico, Peru and Venezuela.

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Figures released by the Brazilian space institute, Inpe, on Monday showed at least 11,088 sq km of rainforest was razed between August 2019 and July this year – the highest figure since 2008.

Carlos Rittl, a Brazilian environmentalist who works at Germany’s Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies, said the numbers were “humiliating, shameful and outrageous” – and a clear sign of the damage being done to the environment since Bolsonaro took office in January 2019.

“This is an area a third the size of Belgium – gigantic areas of forest that are being lost simply because under Bolsonaro those who are doing the destroying feel no fear of being punished,” Rittl said.

“Bolsonaro’s great achievement when it comes to the environment has been this tragic destruction of forests which has turned Brazil into perhaps one of the greatest enemies of the global environment and into an international pariah too.”

Brazil’s vice-president, Hamilton Mourão, tried to put a positive spin on the bleak figures as he visited Inpe’s headquarters in the city of São José dos Campos on Monday. Mourão claimed the annual increase of 9.5% was less than half the anticipated figure of about 20%.

“We’re not here to commemorate any of this, because it’s nothing to commemorate. But it means that the efforts being launched [against Amazon deforestation] are starting to yield fruit,” Mourão claimed.

Environmentalists, who blame Bolsonaro’s deliberate weakening of enforcement efforts for the rise, scoffed at that reading. “This number is an outrage – it doesn’t tell us anything positive about the Bolsonaro administration at all. On the contrary, it shows that despite the [Covid-19] quarantine, environmental crime has increased,” Rittl said.

Mourão’s comment about the smaller-than-expected rise was “like saying that we were expecting 300,000 Covid deaths and we ‘only’ had 200,000,” Rittl added.

Cristiane Mazzetti, a Greenpeace spokesperson for the Amazon, said: “This is an even worse number than 2019 and a direct reflection of the Bolsonaro administration’s anti-environmental policies which have weakened the monitoring agencies and used misguided strategies to fight deforestation, such as deploying the armed forces rather than environmental protection agents.”

“These numbers show us that we are continuing to move in the wrong direction than the one needed to deal with the climate emergency and the biodiversity crisis.”

The Observatório do Clima group said soaring destruction came as no surprise to those “following the dismantling of environmental policy that has been underway in Brazil since January 2019”.

“The numbers simply show that Jair Bolsonaro’s plan has worked. They are the result of a successful project to annihilate the ability of the Brazilian state and its monitoring agencies to care for our forests and fight crime in the Amazon,” it said in a statement.

Mourão said the figures, which were produced with information from the Prodes satellite system, showed most of the devastation was occurring in four regions: Pará state, the north of Mato Grosso state, the south of Amazonas state and Rondônia.

Pará, a longtime deforestation hotspot, was by far the worst-affected state accounting for almost 47% of the total deforestation.

“Thanks to Inpe’s work we now have a perfect sense of where we need to focus our actions in order to prevent illegal activities occurring,” Mourão told reporters, praising its “brilliant scientists” for their efforts.

But despite a growing “green” government propaganda campaign – which recently saw Mourão take foreign ambassadors on a tour of the Amazon region – environmentalists and foreign investors are skeptical about its efforts to protect the world’s biggest rainforest.

During that three-day excursion ambassadors were not taken to any of the deforestation hotspots which Mourão detailed on Monday – and activists dismissed the visit as a “sham”.

In May thousands of Brazilian troops were sent to the Amazon supposedly to fight environmental crime, although some believe they are merely making things worse.

Rittl said one ray of light was the recent defeat of Bolsonaro’s key international ally, Donald Trump. “Without the backing of Trump in the US, the international pressure [on Bolsonaro over the environment] will increase and it will increase a lot,” he predicted.

Bolsonaro is one of only a tiny group of world leaders who has yet to recognise Joe Biden’s victory and on Sunday claimed, without proof, that unnamed “sources” had convinced him the US election had been plagued with fraud.

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Brazil this week became the country with the second most infections worldwide after the United States, with more than 330,000 confirmed cases. But Bolsonaro, who once dismissed Covid-19 as a “little flu,” has urged businesses to reopen, despite many governors stressing social isolation measures to slow the spread.

In the huge intensive care unit (ICU) of Emilio Ribas Infectious Disease Institute in São Paulo, anger swirls among doctors when asked about their President’s comments. “Revolting,” says one. “Irrelevant” declares another.

Dr. Jacques Sztajnbok is more restrained. “It’s not the flu. It’s the worst thing we have ever faced in our professional lives.” His eyes slow and narrow, when I ask if he worries about his health. “Yes,” he says, twice.

The reasons why are clear inside the overwhelming silence of the ICU. Coronavirus kills behind the veil of a hospital curtain, in a stifling quiet, that is so distant and alien to the global upheaval and noisy political divisions it has inspired. But when it takes a life, it is intimately horrifying.

The first noticeable break in the calm is a flashing red light. The second, a doctor’s hair cover, moving up and down just above a privacy screen, as his rigid arms deliver hard, unforgiving chest compressions to a patient.

The patient is in her 40s, and her medical history has meant for days the odds on her survival are bad. But the change, when it comes, is sudden.

Another nurse runs in. In this ICU, the medical staff pause in an outer chamber to gown up and wash, but only moments before racing in. In the corridor outside, a doctor fumble, clumsily pulling on his own. These moments have come countless times before in the pandemic but, this day, it gets no easier. This ICU is full, and still the peak in São Paulo is probably two weeks away.

Through the glass, gowned staff jostle tightly together and circle the patient’s head; to replace tubes; to shift posture; to switch their position and relieve each other from the exhausting task. Their unforgiving compressions on the patients’ sternum are all that keep her alive.

A doctor emerges, sweat on her brow, to pause in the cooler, corridor air. A sliding glass door slams — a rare noise — as another rushes in. For 40 minutes, the quietly frenetic focus continues. And then, without audible warning, it suddenly stops. The lines on the heart monitors are flat, permanently.

Coronavirus has so pervasively damaged our life, but its way of killing remains so often hidden in the confines of ICUs, where only valiant healthcare workers see the trauma. And for the staff here, it feels closer daily.

Two days before our visit, they lost a nurse colleague Mercia Alves, 28 years in the job. Today, they stand together at the glass of another isolation room, inside which is a doctor on their team, intubated. Another colleague tested positive that day. The disease that has filled their hospital seems to be moving in on them.

Emilio Ribas hospital is full of bad tidings — with no more bed space before the peak hits, and staff already dying from the virus — but is the best-equipped the city of São Paulo has. And that is a dark harbinger for Brazil’s weeks ahead. Its biggest city is its wealthiest, where the local governor has insisted on a lockdown and face masks. Yet still the deaths number almost 6,000 and the more than 76,000 confirmed cases are chilling indications of what — even in likely the best-prepared place in Brazil — is to come.

Wealth not health preoccupies Bolsonaro, who has recently started calling the fight against the virus a “war.” But on May 14, he said: “We have to be brave to face this virus. Are people dying? Yes they are, and I regret that. But many more are going to die if the economy continues to be destroyed because of these [lockdown] measures.”

Disease rampant in favelas

Across town, in the favelas there is no debate. Having next to nothing is commonplace, and has brought its own form of isolation from the rest of the city some time ago. But the priority here has long been clear: survival.

Renata Alves laughs, shakes her head, and says “it’s irrelevant,” when asked about Bolsonaro’s opinion the virus is just a “cold.” Her business is serious, and hourly.

Around her, the urgent tasks of staying alive hum. In one room, rows of sewing machines are laid out, where women are taught how to go back to their streets and start making masks from anything they can find. In another, 10,000 meals are brought in, prepared, and then shipped out again, in tiny numbers, to streets unable to put food on their own tables in the lockdown.

Alves, a volunteer health worker with the G10 Favela aid group, heads out to one of the worst-affected areas of the Paraisopolis suburb. Its narrow dense streets and alleyways explain why the disease here is so rampant.

And Alves realizes that she knows only half the picture among a potential 100,000 patients. Only when someone has three symptoms, is she allowed to offer them a Covid-19 test, and even that is paid for here by a private donor. Many cases go undetected.

“Mostly the test is done when the person is already in an advanced stage of the disease,” she says, as she heads into the home of Sabrina, an asthmatic isolating with her three children in three tiny rooms. The doctors use a wooden swab to check the back of her throat with a flashlight, and greet her bored, bewildered children, before moving on.

“Cases can be tough,” Alves tells me. “One obese woman needed eight people to carry her to our ambulance. And a man with Alzheimer’s …we had to ask the family if we could physically remove him from his home. It’s hard.” The woman survived, the man died.

High above the packed street — thronging when everyone seems to come out to meet the trash removal lorry — is Maria Rosa da Silva. The 53-year-old says she thinks she got the virus from going to the market here, even though she wore a mask and gloves. So she’s “locked away,” three floors up on her leafy terrace, without railings. Social distancing seems only possible here if you do it vertically.

“People like me in the risk group are dying,” she stresses. “Even yesterday the owner of the pharmacy died. Many are losing their lives due to someone’s carelessness. If it’s for the good of society, we have to do this.”

Social responsibility in these dangerous and poor streets has also led to an isolation center being made nearby from a deserted school. The government gave over the building to a privately funded project, which now has dozens of patients inside. It is ready, with sparkling uniform dormitories monitored by CCTV, for many more.

Other signs of readiness are less comforting. In the hills above São Paulo, the Vila Formosa graveyard brims with mourning, and yawns in expectation — lined with endless empty and fresh graves. A funeral seems to occur every 10 minutes and even that makes no dent in the numerous new holes dug in the red dust.

Brazil had a headstart — for at least two months it watched the coronavirus tragedy sweep the world.

But the incontrovertible evidence around the world of the disease’s horror, has instead resulted in mixed messages from the government. And the death toll and data set of new cases — ghastly as they are — likely fail to reflect the entirety of the tragedy already underway.

What has happened already elsewhere — and sent warning flares up around the planet — is happening here, all the same, and may well be worse.

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Jair Bolsonaro is leading Brazilians “to the slaughterhouse” with his irresponsible handling of coronavirus, the country’s former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has said.

In an impassioned interview with the Guardian – which came as Brazil’s Covid-19 death toll hit 1,924 – Lula said that by undermining social distancing and defenestrating his own health minister, Brazil’s “troglodyte” leader risked repeating the devastating scenes playing out in Ecuador where families have had to dump their loved ones’ corpses in the streets.

“Unfortunately I fear Brazil is going to suffer a great deal because of Bolsonaro’s recklessness … I fear that if this grows Brazil could see some cases like those horrific, monstrous images we saw in Guayaquil,” said the 74-year-old leftist.

“We can’t just want to topple a president because we don’t like him,” Lula admitted. “[But] if Bolsonaro continues to commit crimes of responsibility … [and] trying to lead society to the slaughterhouse – which is what he is doing – I think the institutions will need to find a way of sorting Bolsonaro out. And that will mean you’ll need to have an impeachment.”

Bolsonaro – a proudly homophobic former army captain already despised by progressive Brazilians for his hostility to the environment, indigenous rights and the arts, as well as his alleged links to Rio’s mafia – has alienated millions more with his dismissive stance towards the coronavirus, which he belittles as media “hysteria” and a “bit of a cold”.

Since the World Health Organization declared the pandemic on 11 March, Brazil’s president has repeatedly thumbed his nose at social distancing, first by egging on and attending pro-Bolsonaro protests and then with a series of provocative visits to bakeries, supermarkets and pharmacies. During one unnecessary outing Bolsonaro declared: “No one will hinder my right to come and go.”

In March the rightwing populist even suggested Brazilians need not worry about Covid-19 since they could bathe in excrement “and nothing happens”.

Such moves put Bolsonaro at loggerheads with his own health minister, Luiz Henrique Mandetta, a doctor-turned-politician who was fired on Thursday after challenging the president’s behaviour.

Meanwhile Bolsonaro’s politician son, Eduardo, has taken the wrecking ball to ties with Brazil’s most important trade partner, China, by accusing its Communist party leaders of being to blame for the coronavirus crisis.

Bolsonaro’s actions have sparked nightly pot-banging protests in cities up and down the country and drawn scorn from across the political spectrum.

“Coronavirus must be laughing its head off,” Eliane Cantanhêde, a columnist for the conservative Estado de São Paulo newspaper, wrote of Bolsonaro’s antics this week.

The rightwing governor of Brazil’s most populous state, São Paulo, has declared the country at war with both the coronavirus and the “Bolsonaro-virus”.

Lula, who governed from 2003 until 2010, claimed that Bolsonaro’s “grotesque” actions were endangering lives by ignoring distancing guidelines put in place by Brazil’s own health ministry.

“It’s natural that a portion of society doesn’t understand the need to stay at home or how serious this is – especially when the president of the republic is a troglodyte who says it’s just a little flu,” Lula said by video call from the Brazilian city of São Bernardo do Campo, where he is in self-isolation after returning from a tour of Europe.

“The truth is Bolsonaro doesn’t think about the impact his destructive acts have on society. He’s reckless.”

Bolsonaro says his opposition to distancing stems from his desire to protect Brazil’s most vulnerable citizens and their jobs.

After sacking his health minister, Bolsonaro claimed to be fighting for “the long-suffering Brazilian people” and warned coronavirus threatened to become “a veritable meat grinder of jobs”.

“At no point has the government abandoned the neediest … The impoverished masses cannot stay stuck up at home,” Bolsonaro said. “I know … life is priceless. But the economy and jobs must return to normal.”

Lula, who was born into rural poverty and won international plaudits for his fight against hunger, scoffed at the idea Bolsonaro was a champion of the poor.

“Bolsonaro is only interested in himself, his kids, some pretty conservative generals and his paramilitary friends,” he claimed, in reference to longstanding allegations over the Brazilian president’s family ties to the Rio de Janeiro mafia.

“He doesn’t speak to society. Bolsonaro doesn’t have ears to listen. He just has a mouth to talk nonsense.”

While Brazil’s former president claimed impeachment was an option, he conceded there was not currently support for that in the country’s congress, as there was when his leftwing successor Dilma Rousseff was removed from office in 2016.

He said many rightwing politicians thought it wiser to allow Bolsonaro to continue sabotaging his chances of re-election in 2022 through his own incompetence – before electing another president from the right.

Lula, who was sidelined from 2018’s election after being jailed on disputed corruption charges, signalled he would not be the leftwing candidate in that contest.

“I’ve lost my political rights so I’m not talking about myself,” said Lula, who was released in November 2019 from 580 days in prison after a supreme court ruling.

“But I’ll tell you something, you can be certain the left will be governing Brazil again after 2022. We don’t need to talk about who the candidate is right now. But we will vote for someone who is committed to human rights and respects them, who respects environmental protection, who respects the Amazon … who respects blacks and the indigenous. We’re going to elect someone who is committed to the poor of this country.”

Observers of Brazilian politics are less sure Bolsonaro is totally finished – or that the left is well positioned to replace him.

Some believe Bolsonaro – one of just four world leaders still downplaying coronavirus alongside the authoritarian presidents of Nicaragua, Belarus and Turkmenistan – has obliterated his chances of a second term with his response to the crisis.

But Thomas Traumann, a political commentator and communications minister under Rousseff, said such certainty was premature: “There are two centuries to go until 2022.”

Traumann said it was clear Bolsonaro had severely weakened himself – but so far rightwing politicians such as the governors of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo appeared to be capitalising on Bolsonaro’s blunders the most.

And ultimately Brazil was hurtling into such an unpredictable and potentially tumultuous few weeks that it was impossible to know what the political fallout might be.

“We know Bolsonaro will come out of this weaker. We know his mistakes will not be forgiven,” Traumann said.

How the political chips would fall after that was anyone’s guess, Traumman added, likening Brazil’s predicament to the start of a rollercoaster ride.

“All we know is that many loops lie ahead … We are moving into an unknown world … We are sailing in the darkness.”

Lula said he was certain of one thing: that at a moment of national crisis, Brazil needed a leader capable of uniting its 211 million citizens.

“A president should be like the conductor of an orchestra,” he said. “The problem is that our conductor knows nothing about music, can’t read a score and doesn’t even know how the batons work.

“He’s trying to play classical music with the instruments you use to play samba. He’s turned his orchestra into a madness – a Tower of Babel,” Lula said. “He doesn’t know what he’s doing in the presidential palace … Not even Trump takes him seriously.”

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