The Diplomat
The Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares, said yesterday that the assault in Brazil against the Congress, the Presidential Palace and the headquarters of the Federal Supreme Court by hundreds of supporters of former President Jair Bolsonaro shows that “democracy is something we have to defend every day” and regretted that the first reaction of the PP on this incident did not include “any word of support” for the President of Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
The incidents in Brazil were mentioned in the morning by the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, during the inauguration of the VII Conference of Ambassadors, in which he expressed his support for Lula da Silva “and for the institutions freely and democratically elected by the Brazilian people”.
He also warned that the news coming from Brazil shows that “the greatest threat to democracy, peace and prosperity in the world” is the “resurgence of ultra movements” whose methods “are repeated millimetrically in each and every country”: the “systematic use of lies to attract followers”, the “recourse to insults, to verbal violence, to poison the coexistence of society” and the “attack on democratic institutions and democratic legality”. “We saw it in the United States, we are seeing it today in Brazil and we witness it daily in different latitudes,” he added.
In the same sense, Albares affirmed, in declarations to Cadena SER, that what happened in Brazil followed a pattern “practically identical” to the assault on the Capitol in the United States, which occurred just two years ago, with a “Trumpist” ultra-right that refuses to “recognize clear and democratic results after a vote and which have been ratified by the competent authority”. This type of incident, he warned, demonstrates that “democracy is something we have to defend every day”.
Likewise, both during the interview to Cadena SER and in the one granted later to Onda Cero, Albares harshly criticized the first reactions of the PP to the assault in Brazil, with special mention to the PP spokeswoman, Cuca Gamarra, whose first tweet related to these events was a response to Pedro Sánchez’s message of condemnation. “With you, in Spain this is now a simple public disorder,” said the popular leader in reference to the reform of the Penal Code.
The president of the PP, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, expressed on Sunday, through the same social network (and after Gamarra’s first message), the support of his party “to the Brazilian people” and made “a call for the immediate restoration of constitutional order.” “One cannot give in to populisms and radicalism, which try to undermine respect for institutions, democracy and public freedoms,” she added. Gamarra herself later disseminated another message in which she affirmed that “coupism has no place anywhere” and recalled “how fragile democracies are also and the obligation to strengthen and protect them.”
“I have been very concerned that the main opposition party, in its first public manifestation, has nothing to say regarding democracy in Brazil, that it has nothing to say regarding the ultra-right and the ultra-right movements,” Albares declared to Cadena SER. In subsequent statements to Onda Cero, the minister also regretted that the PP’s first reaction did not include “any word of support for Lula da Silva.” “This shows that the PP, in terms of foreign policy, has nothing to offer Spain or to say about the defense of democracy in Latin America,” he added.
