Faith & Spirit Quote by Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva

In one crisp line, Lula turns Davos from a conference into a chapel. The jab lands because it names what polite global-economic talk tries to disguise: ideology posing as inevitability. By calling the market a "god", he isn’t merely insulting financiers; he’s exposing the ritual logic of the World Economic Forum, where faith in capital’s wisdom often replaces accountable political choice.

The intent is confrontational but strategic. Lula speaks as a labor-rooted politician from the Global South, addressing an arena that historically treated countries like Brazil as variables in someone else’s model: risk, commodity supply, emerging-market potential. The subtext is that Davos elites preach neutrality while smuggling in moral claims: austerity is "discipline", deregulation is "freedom", inequality is "incentives". Once the market is sacred, dissent becomes heresy and social policy becomes an indulgence.

The line also reverses the usual hierarchy of legitimacy. Politicians are cast as the meddling ones, markets as the rational arbiters. Lula flips it: markets are belief systems with winners, losers, and priests, and politics is the only forum where those stakes can be argued openly. It’s a warning against outsourcing democracy to price signals.

Context matters: early-2000s globalization triumphalism, post-Washington Consensus orthodoxy, Latin America’s backlash after debt crises and IMF prescriptions. Lula’s point isn’t anti-trade so much as anti-idolatry: when the market becomes the sole authority, human needs get demoted to externalities.