I get his (mild) attacks on Bolsonaro make him look better, but he's not done any actual fucking reforms. At all. All he did during his first government was create some means tested welfare programs and keep public funding going, all while not combatting the bourgeoisie's interests. Which in turn, left ample time for fascism to grow, he even funded some of the exponents of it like Igreja Universal do Reino de Deus (evangelical cult that is much like US prosperity gospel). Not to mention shooting incarceration rates sky high by kicking off the war on drugs by law in 2006 and invading Haiti on behalf of the UN in 2004
His ministries are all commanded by neolibs, and even far right União Brasil in communications and tourism.
His main deed as of this year has been pushing new fiscal policy for the government which will deepen the already horrible one that was put in by Temer. It even has penalties for "overspending" like forbidding the government from creating new public jobs and such!
Fucking interest in loans is the actual highest in the world at 13.25%! (~9% per year accounting for inflation)
Just because a government doesn't outright support the public sanctions on Cuba, China and the DPRK it doesn't make it a fucking ally, hell, many European countries do the same and I don't see y'all praising it.
Lula is not moving Brazil any, and I mean any, closer to liberation. This job is up for the communists, nominally the Brazilian Communist Party (which is at the moment undergoing a split due to a complacent and persecutory petit-bourgeois central committee that doesn't want to oppose Lula but that's beside the point)
Every time I see Lula praise here one of my neurons explodes with anger
Edit FYI: I am actually organized in the youth of the Brazilian Communist Party. If y'all want any more info just ask (ofc nothing confidential)
Another difference is that he also commands the leadership of the party and gets elected, while Bernie is just happy to kneel to the Democrats and do the occasional speech to his fans. They're not that similar in practice and I do have a bit of critical support for the PT, but that doesn't mean I endorse them, or electoralism for that matter. They're a bourgeois social-democratic party with all the liberalisms you can expect, but at least they aren't actively telling their followers to kill communists, and voting costs nothing. (you actually pay a fine equivalent to 1 dollar if you don't vote lmao)
You could just vote communist instead, there's a second round if things are this close for president/governor
And I usually do, yeah. The critical support only goes for when fascists and (more rightwing) liberals go outright slanderous against them. Dilma-Temer-Bolsonaro sequence was quite horrible and I think a big part of it (besides intelligence agencies and capitalist interference) was that we allowed right-wingers into our movements against them and suddenly they co-opted everything and suddenly it was all about "liberty" and "fighting communism" with way more financial support than communists could counter. The criticism/support balance is usually incredibly hard to find with social-democrats, and most often it's by design to make themselves seem like the "One True Effective Left Party."
But voting is hardly enough, which is why I'm patiently waiting for the restructuring from the PCB (that has been long overdue in my opinion) and for things to calm down there to try and get organised through them too.
Edit: for instance, the Unidade Popular party and PCB have this nasty habit of allying (more like submit) themselves with PSOL which is hardly much better than PT themselves. PSOL is not even that big of a party, there's no reason communists should play the junior role to the junior left-liberals.
Fully agreed there and we're opposing this tailism with PSOL within PCB. The split currently going down is also about that. Have the manifesto of the fraction that defends the continuation of the revolutionary reconstruction of the party: https://emdefesadocomunismo.com.br/manifesto-em-defesa-da-reconstrucao-revolucionaria-do-pcb/
Unidade Popular is just hopeless unfortunately. They're not even a political party, just a front for a hoxhaist (as such dogmatic) one, PCR that is causing all sorts of trouble to actually organizing folks (fraud in union/student union elections, etc.)
Yeah, PCR has some weird talk:action ratio and I even started a conspiracy theory in my head that they're a CIA thing because their youth branch has a weird name that looks like somebody badly translated an English name and I couldn't find information about a single person that is part of it.
I'm probably jumping at shadows, but if it talks like a fed and quacks like a fed...