Despite the recent setback at the G7 Summit, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has not given up his intention to mediate to end the war between Russia and Ukraine. The issue has been the focus of the visit that the Brazilian president made this Wednesday to Pope Francis, who during the four years of Jair Bolsonaro’s government ignored the head of state of the greatest power in Latin America.
“We are in times of war and peace is very fragile, I am going to give him what we do here, in our workshops,” the Pope said before the 45-minute audience as he presented Lula with a gift. “It is a very weak flower that says ‘peace is a fragile flower,'” added the Argentine pontiff.
The Pope’s gift to Lula was not accidental. Peace in Ukraine is an obsession that both share, although the Ukrainian president, Volodimir Zelenski, has shown clear signs of disinterest in the face of Lula’s mediation attempt: he planted the Brazilian president in a bilateral meeting agreed at the G7 in Hiroshima.
Beyond the shared concern for Ukraine, Lula’s presence in the Vatican is a relevant fact in itself: in October 2022, before the second round of the Brazilian elections, Francis called for banishing hatred from the country, which It was interpreted by many Bolsonaristas as supporting Lula.
“Lula’s trip to the Holy See breaks a years-long fast,” said analyst Elio Gaspari in O Globo.
“Pope Francis was renovating, handing over the cardinal’s cap to the Archbishop of Manaus, Leonardo Steiner. The decision was undoubtedly appropriate for a time when the Amazon and its peoples live under threat.”
Lula was accompanied by Foreign Minister Mauro Vieira, the Special Advisor for International Affairs, Celso Amorim, and the First Lady, Rosângela da Silva. After the meeting with the Pope, Lula has met with the number two of the Vatican Secretary of State, Edgar Peña Parra, since Pietro Parolin is away. It is estimated that details of the visit that the Pope plans to make in 2024 to southern Brazil have been discussed at that meeting, on a trip that will also include Argentina and Uruguay.
Before meeting the Pope, Lula met with the President of Italy, Sergio Mattarella. The two leaders talked about world news, Lula invited the Italian president to visit Brazil and recalled that Brazil has the largest Italian colony in the world, which makes the two countries “brothers.”
Wednesday closed with the meeting between Lula and the Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni, at the ideological antipodes of the Brazilian and with whom he had serious friction in the past.
Meloni was especially critical of Lula for the case of the terrorist Cesare Battisti, convicted of four murders that occurred in the late 1970s in Italy. Battisti spent almost 40 years on the run from Italian justice, 14 of them in Brazil, and benefited from a decision by Lula, who on the last day of his second term, in 2010, granted political refuge to the Italian. The decision created friction with Italy, which was demanding his extradition. A sector of Italians hates Lula, even today, after that decision.
“Lula, stop campaigning on dead Italians,” Meloni tweeted in June 2011. Twelve years later, he received him with honors at Chigi Palace.
There were predictably kinder meetings for the Brazilian president, who met Massimo D’Alema, former prime minister and, as a representative of the center-left, ideologically related.
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