The headline in the Guardian could not have spelt it out more clearly: ‘World leaders rush to congratulate Lula on Brazil election victory’.  From North America to Europe to Australia, the sigh of relief that Lula had beaten Jair Bolsonaro in last October’s general election was audible. Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau was cock-a-hoop, so too French president Emmanuel Macron, who heralded the turning of a ‘a new page’ in Brazil’s history and declared. ‘Together, we will join forces to take up the many common challenges and renew the ties of friendship between our two countries.’

It turns out the friendship Lula values most isn’t with Macron or anyone else in the West but with Xi Jinping. Lula was in Beijing at the end of last week, warmly welcomed by the Chinese president (in contrast to the humiliation endured by Macron a few days earlier), who called the Brazilian leader his ‘good old friend’.

That wasn’t Lula’s only swipe at the West during his time in China

Friends they are, and Lula explained that the purpose of his jolly to China was to strengthen ties. ‘We want to raise the level of the strategic partnership between our countries, expand trade flows and, together with China, balance world geopolitics,’ said Lula,

It was a fruitful trip for the 77-year-old Lula, who signed a dozen agreements with Xi, said to be worth $10 billion (£8 billion), and who clearly hopes a new world order is emerging.

‘Every night I ask myself why all countries have to base their trade on the dollar,’ he said, adding that it is high time that the nations in the BRICS Grouping –  Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa – agreed an alternative currency to the dollar for trade deals.

That wasn’t Lula’s only swipe at the West during his time in China. He was very proud to have paid a call on telecom company Huawei, under US sanctions, declaring that it was a ‘demonstration that we want to say to the world that we don’t have any bias in our relationship with the Chinese, and that no one will prohibit Brazil from improving its relationship with China’.

Lula also upbraided the USA for ‘encouraging war’ in Ukraine, a criticism he applied to European nations who he said were not doing enough to bring about a peaceful resolution to the conflict. The remarks were appreciated by Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov, who arrived in Brazil on Monday for trade talks with Lula. He told reporters that Moscow was ‘grateful to our Brazilian friends for their clear understanding of the genesis of the situation.’

The White House has rejected Lula’s accusation of war-mongering and called his stance ‘misguided’. The same could be said of how the West responded to Lula’s re-election last year. After all, this is a man who has served time in prison for corruption (even if the conviction was subsequently annulled on a technicality).

During his first time in office (2003-2010), Lula dropped the odd clue about how he viewed the West. He blamed the 2007-08 banking crisis on ‘the irrational behaviour of white people with blue eyes’, and he angered Italy by personally intervening to prevent the extradition of Cesare Battisti, a Communist killer convicted of killing four people in the 1970s.

Battisti’s luck ran out in January 2019 when he was extradited to Italy (where he pleaded guilty to his crimes) by the newly elected Jair Bolsonaro. It was, explained the right-wing president, a ‘little gift’ to Italy.

Bolsonaro came to office wanting to be a friend of the West and not caring if he upset the Chinese. He visited Taiwan and warned that China’s strategy is ‘not buying in Brazil; it is buying Brazil’. It was a deliberate policy of Bolsonaro to break from previous administrations which had been ‘friendly with communist regimes.’

At the same time, Bolsonaro declared his admiration of US president Donald Trump, a friendship for which he was never forgiven. As Foreign Policy put it last year, the Brazilian president became ‘persona non grata in the West’, a man despised by the political and media elite. This contempt increased once Biden replaced Trump in the White House. Rejected by the West, Bolsonaro softened his stance towards China.

A month before Lula was re-elected president of Brazil, there was another tumultuous election victory. But in this case western leaders did not rush to congratulate Giorgia Meloni on becoming the first female prime minister of Italy. There was stony silence or, in the case of French prime minister Elisabeth Borne a sullen warning to Meloni that ‘in Europe, we have certain values and, obviously, we will be vigilant’.

What values was Meloni endangering? She hadn’t made eyes at Putin – on the contrary she had expressed her staunch support for Ukraine – and nor had she harboured a terrorist killer. She has also never seen the inside of a prison cell.

But what Meloni had done was express opposition to the progressive ideals of open borders and gender ideology, while sticking up for her belief in family and church. For those heinous crimes she will never be forgiven by her fellow world leaders.