Protests in Sao Paulo, Brazil, March 2015. Flickr. Some rights reserved.
Towards the end of 2008, the up market Galería Oeste in São Paulo was selling plush teddies of Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva for US$20,000. The presidential effigy had become a fashionable lucky mascot. You could love it or hate it. You could mistreat it with feigned contempt but never lose respect for it. Artist Raul Mourão’s “Lula Teddy” project highlighted the president’s main achievement, namely to unify emotionally one of the world’s most unequal countries. Before Lula, the only unifying factor among Brazilians, at any rate according to the sardonic wisdom of bar chat, was the singer Chico Buarque. A few years after the PT (Worker's Party) landed in government, unanimity had become Lula: the homespun president who managed to please and compensate both rich and poor alike. Despite corruption cases such as the vote-buying Mensalão scandal, only 11% of Brazilians thought, back in 2008, that the president’s administration was bad. Lula was an icon, an almost untouchable myth. "He was a perfect product of mass marketing", Raul Mourão said at the time.
Seven years later, the Lula Teddy has transmuted into a huge inflatable doll in prison garb paraded in demonstrations calling for Dilma Roussef ’s impeachment. On August 16, an enormous doll bearing the number 13-171 presided over a demonstration in Brasilia: 13 being the PT’s number in the electronic voting system and 171 the article of the penal code dealing with racketeering. The latter number is also slang for someone who is not to be trusted. From a lucky mascot to a satirical dummy.
