‘We cannot be scared, nervous and anxious when there is a crisis. A crisis is for us to create new things,’ said Brazil’s president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva last August, as his government launched a new programme to ‘protect Brazilian exporters and workers’ from the impact of US tariffs.1
It was a show of defiance – an approach Lula has become known for after Donald Trump announced 50 per cent tariffs on all Brazilian imports one month before. Among other measures, the Sovereign Brazil Plan made available R$30 billion (US$5.5 billion) in credit, for small and medium-sized businesses in particular. It even won praise from the Federation of Industries of the State of São Paulo (FIESP) and the Confederation of National Industry (CNI), neither of which have been dependable supporters of Workers’ Party (PT) governments. Compared to other programmes for industry, it represented a small investment, which would fall far short of offsetting the impact of the proposed tariffs.
