Lula shuns elite for anti-capitalist Social Forum

Davos: Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva is shunning the World Economic Forum in Davos this week and the chance to hobnob with business leaders and 41 heads of state.

Instead, he'll join more than 100,000 activists from around the world at an anti-capitalist jamboree in the Amazon.

Lula's government is spending 78 million reais (Dh126.24 million) to bring groups from 59 countries to the 8th World Social Forum.

They include a sex workers union from India and Belgians seeking to abolish the World Bank.

He was scheduled to discuss the global financial crisis on a panel with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, one of the US's harshest critics, and Chavez's presidential allies from Bolivia, Ecuador and Paraguay.

"He's picked sides," said Oded Grajew, a former businessman who organised the first Social Forum as a counterpoint to Davos in 2001 and has been a friend of Lula's for 20 years.

"Lula doesn't want go to Davos and hear the same ideas that led the world into bankruptcy."

Lula's decision to attend the forum is a slap at the bankers whose "casino" mentality he cites almost weekly as bringing about a crisis in capitalism.

It also helps shore up support among his leftist base, who heckled him at his last appearance at the forum in 2005 for allegedly governing on behalf of Brazil's elites.

In 2003, Lula, a former trade union leader, used his first trip to Davos as president to assure investors he had no intention of defaulting on the country's foreign debt.

Returning for the third time in 2007, he was praised by Davos president Klaus Schwab for creating a model of "globalisation with a human face."

Opposing globalisation was one of the organising themes of the first Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Lula's Workers' Party, which helped fund the event, has backed it ever since.

In 2002, Lula, 63, announced his presidential candidacy at the second gathering, telling red-flag waving crowds that Brazil was "too poor" to pay foreigners what it owed.

This year's forum, titled "Another World Is Possible," takes place in Belem, a city on the mouth of the Amazon River.

"These days, any suggestion Brazil's credit standing depends on whether its president sprints to a Swiss ski resort and eats oysters and champagne with bankers is preposterous," said James Galbraith, a University of Texas economist who is scheduled to meet Lula in March in Brasilia and advised President Barack Obama during the campaign. "Davos needs Lula. Lula doesn't need Davos."

Lula will be joined by a dozen cabinet ministers, including his preferred successor as president, Cabinet Chief Dilma Rousseff.