Lula spent the transition doing all sorts of elaborate horse trading with the 20 or so parties in Congress to build a coalition. He's built this coalition with a bunch of opportunistic center-right parties that will probably back him on many of his efforts to boost growth, but aren't going to champion leftist social causes. It's not clear yet that Lula understands that big spending of the kind when he was last president is the solution for Brazil's current problems.