Lindsay Tanner’s citing of Lula da Silva’s Brazil as an example of a ‘Third Way’ success story is not an accurate one (‘Chariots of Fire’, April 2011).
The recent increase in living standards and poverty alleviation that Tanner points to is due not to a new-found faith in ‘free markets’, but rather to the long-overdue implementation of the Bolsa Familia dole payment and a corresponding increase in government-funded social projects in the favelas, as well as the fact that tuition in public universities remains free and, most importantly perhaps, that the more neo-liberalist tendencies of the former president were kept in check by a relatively strong workers’ movement (Tanner’s “shop-floor myopia”), resulting in resources remaining publicly owned. These classical elements of the welfare state, combined with the radical legislation mandating private universities to set aside places for Afro-Brazilians, are hardly a part of the discredited Third Way approach.
Whilst attacking Latin American “intellectually bankrupt left-wing populism”, Tanner fails to see that the reason Lula has been successful is that he has avoided (or been forced to avoid) the neo-liberalism that has been so eagerly embraced with such disastrous results throughout the region (for example the Bolivian water privatisation and the Argentinian economic collapse of the 1990s).
Daniel Laurence
Bronte, NSW
