Airport traffic increases, and the elite can now invoke the spirit of Danuza Leão.

Lula is rightly celebrating the increase in passenger traffic at Brazilian airports in the first months of 2025. There were 51 million travelers from January to May, a 10% increase compared to the same period in 2024. The data comes from the Supply and Demand Report of the National Civil Aviation Agency (ANAC). The countdown begins for the outcry from the elite of backwardness.

The wealthy, who have always traveled by plane, cannot tolerate middle-class people – or former lower-middle-class people, let's say – crowding flights and airports. Those who, for example, protest against things like exempting those earning up to R$ 5 a month from income tax are the complainers. These are "patriots" who complain about paying taxes while employing sophisticated tax evasion techniques.

The poor bother the rich, even though fortunes are built on the exploitation of their labor.

To remember is to live. Let us remember Danuza Leão, Nara's sister, a columnist for a major newspaper, a successful model in the 1960s, who passed away in 2022. When the first boom in Brazilian airports occurred in 2012, she declared in O Globo: "Going to New York has lost its charm. Now even domestic workers can go."

Back then, the mainstream press, with a disdainful tone that would make Odete Roitman envious, reported that "Class C discovers airports." Yes, much to the annoyance of the backward elite, many workers were trading the greasy floors of bus stations for the marble surfaces of airports. 

Danuza was not alone. Arnaldo Jabor was another frequent user of irony directed at the so-called "new middle class" and its consumption habits. The ineffable Diogo Mainardi, then at Veja magazine in its worst period, saw the increase in popular consumption as "vulgarization."

And, of course, the neoliberal economists still present in the media today treated the increase in consumption as "the result of irresponsible populism," stemming from "excessive debt." Almost nothing has changed: Lula continues to improve the lives of the people, and the elite of backwardness protests against any sign that the country is advancing, however slightly, towards greater equality.