On the verge of turning 81, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva wants to be president once again, his fourth, and govern until he is 85. In one line the moment of one of the most important leaders in the contemporary history of Latin America is summarized, a politician who seems to admit nothing other than being eternal.
"Lula is already a historical figure in Brazil, being president once again is not going to add anything to him," Julio María Sanguinetti, twice Uruguayan president, told EL MUNDO. «In addition, I notice him more tense than in his first two governments. Lula was very happy, witty. "I think that after his time in prison he has been a little psychologically marked."
Four years ago, Lula ended the electoral campaign without a voice in the face of elections in which he would defeat Jair Bolsonaro very narrowly, 50.9 to 49.1 percent. Four years later, the rival is Flavio, the eldest son of the former president, an emblem of the Brazilian hard right. But Lula, hegemonic leader and without rival on the left centered around the Workers' Party (PT), still has a voice. With his interviews, speeches and endless appearances on all types of platforms showing his routine in the gym, he always says the same thing: do not confuse me with Joe Biden, I am fit to govern.
Lula was born in the impoverished northeast of the country, in an adobe house with just two rooms in which its nine occupants took turns on a mattress. The others managed it on the ground. His father abandoned him when he was two weeks old to start a parallel family, in 1964 he lost a finger on his left hand working as a turner, his first wife died in 1971 of hepatitis, and with her went the son he was carrying. He overcame laryngeal cancer a decade ago, his second wife died in 2017 and he spent almost two years in prison between 2018 and 2019, convicted of corruption before being released by the Supreme Federal Court (STF), which ruled that the judge who had convicted him did not have the jurisdiction to do so.
Deeply in love with and dependent on Rosângela Lula da Silva (Janja), his third wife, 21 years his junior, he once admitted in an interview with Time magazine that politics lives in every cell of his body, in his blood, in his head.
"I have a cause," says Lula when asked why he continues.
A street vendor at the age of eight and a shoe shiner at the age of nine, he was a dry cleaning assistant in his adolescence, before joining a metallurgical company at the age of 14 and becoming a turner.
The times of union leadership would arrive, followed by his political growth during the military dictatorship that began in 1964, and in democracy since 1985. At that point he had already added his nickname, "Lula", to his legal name. A PT deputy in 1986, he lost three consecutive presidential elections (1989, 1994 and 1998) before winning those in 2002, 2006 and 2022. By then he had already abandoned the Che Guevara t-shirts and moderated his image, which frightened the Brazilian middle classes and the powerful businessmen of one of the largest economies in the world. Gone was the provocation of a group of Brazilian businessmen in 1989, when they announced that they would buy a plane to leave the country together if Lula was president.
Lula is, above all things, a profound pragmatist. His economic policy was far from the statist daydreams of many of his neighbors, although he uses the State as a lever in the economy and to provide subsidies and support to the most disadvantaged Brazilians, of whom there are many in a deeply unequal country.
He considers himself the most important leader in Latin America, detests the Argentine Javier Milei and stands as an equal to all presidents and world powers. Among them, Donald Trump, with whom the antagonism of recent times yields him in electoral terms.
