latam

I guess what disappoints me the most in Lula's current government is the constant conciliation and compromise.

It's fair to be afraid of what comes next. I am too. There's no political figure on Lula's level anywhere in Brazil, to say nothing of the center left in general or his own party. But what you're describing here is governing. There are always limits to power, and there are further limits imposed by local politics and Congress. We are, for an instance, lucky that the brazilian judiciary is the sort to permit gay marriage by fiat, and that the evangelical lobbies are still too weak to legislate against it. But barring that sort of thing it's hard to find a single political figure that would have performed as well as Lula did in his center-left agenda.

Lula has been able to do good things because of the conciliation and compromise. He's been able to rule the country despite being a minority government because he's uniquely able to deal with the bourgeoisie's material interests. For good and ill, Lula is just about the last politician capable of talking to the political elites of Brazil in a way that does not render them schizophrenic and self sabotaging.

I mean you're running a country so you have two choices, conciliatory liberalism so that the opposition at least sorta works with you and doesn't actively coup you or you gulag the opposition and remove them from power. If you don't have the popular support and strength of arms to do the latter, well, you're stuck with conciliation and compromise