Brazil’s president-elect has faced a backlash at home after flying to the Cop27 environmental summit on a private jet owned by a millionaire businessman.
Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was elected on 30 October and has vowed to undo much of the environmental damage wrought by the outgoing far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro.
Under Bolsonaro, Amazonian deforestation hit a 15-year high after he gutted protection agencies and encouraged loggers, prospectors and ranchers into the rainforest to take advantage of its abundant natural resources.
But Lula’s decision to fly to Egypt on a Gulfstream G600 owned by a health industry mogul was criticised by both opponents and supporters.
“If he is really travelling on [a] private jet it’s a careless mistake he should have avoided,” one former minister said. “There are things you can’t do as a president, even before being sworn in.”
Lula’s spokesman said he would not comment on the issue but his vice-president-elect said the plane’s owner, José Seripieri Junior, was accompanying Lula to Egypt rather than lending him the aircraft.
Lula’s transition coordinator argued he had committed no crime.
“Lula is not yet president of the republic, he doesn’t have the use of government aircraft,” Wellington Dias said on the Roda Viva interview show. “So there’s no rule that stops him from getting a lift.”
Dias pointed out that Lula cannot travel on commercial airlines due to the significant chance of him being harassed or attacked by far-right radicals, some of whom have openly expressed a wish to see him dead.
But the controversy, coming just two weeks after Lula beat Bolsonaro in the tightest runoff election since Brazil’s military dictators gave up power in 1985, was evidence he will enjoy little or no honeymoon period.
Lula does not take power until 1 January but last week the Brazilian real lost value against the dollar and the stock market had its biggest one-day fall in almost a year after he gave a speech saying he would govern for the poor, not the financial markets.
Both recouped much of the value the next day but it was a stark warning that the leftist leader will have little room for manoeuvre, especially with Bolsonaro forces strong in Congress and hardcore supporters still on the streets denying the election result.
Lula served as president between 2003 and 2011 before giving way to Workers’ party colleague Dilma Rousseff. Rousseff was impeached and a corruption scandal engulfed the party, leading to Lula’s imprisonment in 2018.
He was released almost two years later and the charges were annulled on a technicality but many voters have never forgiven him.
The furore over his trip to Egypt added to the sense of foreboding after the private jet’s owner was named as Seripieri Junior, founder of Qualicorp, one of Brazil’s best-known private health plans.
Seripiero founded Qualicorp in 1997 but left the company in 2019 and now runs another health plan called Qsaúde. He was briefly arrested in 2020 as part of an investigation into illegal campaign funding.
He was also an early backer of Lula’s presidential bid, hosting dinners with other business leaders who had shown reluctance to meet with the leftist challenger.
