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Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the leftist leader who is known simply as Lula, will return as president of Brazil to serve an unprecedented third term. He defeated incumbent far right President Jair Bolsonaro by a narrow margin of 50.90 per cent to 49.10 per cent as nearly all votes in the runoff election were counted on Sunday (October 30) night.
Lula was Brazil’s president for two terms from 2003 to 2006 and then 2007 to 2011, during which period the country saw a massive commodities boom, which paid for sweeping social welfare programmes that are credited with having raised millions of people out of poverty.
He is a charismatic leader with a frequently-recounted backstory: he could not read or write until he was 10 years old, and he had to stop studying after grade 5 because he needed to work full-time. He became a metalworker and was elected leader of the workers’ union in 1975. He led large workers’ strikes against Brazil’s military regime, and in 1980, he co-founded the Workers’ Party (PT) that would become the main leftwing political force in the country.
Lula entered Congress in 1986, and made several attempts at winning the presidency, a goal that he could finally achieve in 2002. When he left office at the end of 2010 because Brazilian law does not allow a third consecutive presidential term, he had an approval rating of 90 per cent.
The next decade was difficult for Lula, and tumultuous for Brazil. Soon after leaving office, Lula had to fight cancer of the throat, and his successor in the post, Dilma Rousseff, was impeached and removed from office in 2016. The following year, Lula was convicted of charges of corruption and money laundering in an investigation into the working of the state-run oil giant Petrobras.
In April 2018, a year before Bolsonaro came to power, Lula started to serve a 12-year sentence in prison. However, in March 2021, Lula’s conviction was overturned by Brazil’s Supreme Court, paving the way for his return to political life after serving 580 days in prison.
India has had excellent relations with Brazil under Lula. He visited India as the Chief Guest at the Republic Day parade in 2004, and then again in 2007 and 2008, and he hosted Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in 2006 and 2010, and President Pratibha Patil in 2008. Lula was president of Brazil when the first BRIC (South Africa was still not a member of the grouping then) was held in Russia in 2009.
The presidential election was a contest between Brazil’s two biggest leaders, occupying two poles of the political spectrum. President Bolsonaro had come to power on a far right platform, and had pressed forward with his agenda — which has been seen to have resulted in mismanagement of the Covid-19 pandemic at home, and pushed the world closer to environmental catastrophe by wanton destruction of the Amazon rainforest.
Over the past decade, Brazil’s economy has slowed down considerably. While Bolsonaro had promised greater deregulation and privatisation, Lula has focussed on food and housing for the poor, especially those who have been hit the worst by the pandemic.
Lula’s victory underlines the decisive shift to the left in Latin American politics. The change began with the election in 2018 of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador in Mexico, and was followed by the victories for Alberto Fernandez in Argentina in 2019, and Gabriel Boric in Chile, Pedro Castillo in Peru, and Gustavo Petro in Colombia. After Lula’s victory, six of the region’s biggest economies will be run by Leftist politicians.
Still, the margin of Bolsonaro’s defeat has been very thin, and he remains a powerful figure in the global surge of right-wing populism. Before the election, there were fears, stoked by Bolsonaro’s own statements, that he might, in the case of defeat, seek to undermine the integrity of the electoral process or to reject its outcome altogether.
