On June 22, 2002, Brazilian metalworker, union leader, and presidential candidate Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva wrote an open “Letter to the Brazilian People.” In a few sparse pages, Lula, as he is commonly known, tried to toe a fine line. On one hand, he acknowledged the enormity of the challenges facing the country. After two decades of military dictatorship, followed by another two decades of privatization and pro-market reforms that had sent inequality spiraling (as was the case with many of Brazil’s Latin American neighbors), Brazil’s economy was in dire straits: nearly half of the country was living in poverty. In the letter, Lula declared his ambitions to combat homelessness, agrarian poverty, and hunger. A founding member of the Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT), or Workers’ Party, he pointed to his track record as a radical labor leader as evidence of his commitment to the challenge. On the other hand, he acknowledged the entrenched nature of the country’s heavily financialized, market-based economy, which he must have realized could not be remade overnight. 

“There are no miracles in the life of a people and a country,” he wrote. “A lucid and judicious transition will be necessary between what we have today and what society demands. What was undone or left undone in eight years will not be made up for in eight days.” Mentioning recent volatility in the country’s financial markets, Lula both blamed it on the previous presidential administration and acknowledged the broader system’s fragility. He continued: “The premise of this transition will naturally be respect for the country's contracts and obligations.” That is to say, respect for the global order of finance and debt itself. 

Originally read aloud at a PT meeting, then published in the newspaper Folha de São Paulo two days later, the letter was ostensibly addressed to the Brazilian public. However, Lula was really speaking to the country’s financial sector. At the time, domestic and foreign investors and creditors were concerned that economic collapse was a real possibility if the leftist Lula, who had run for president unsuccessfully three times in the ’80s and ’90s, actually pulled out a win—something they referred to as “the Lula risk.” Perhaps not wanting to jeopardize his chance to secure a victory that had so long been out of his and his party’s reach, Lula sought to calm his adversaries. Despite his radical past and his party’s ambitious political agenda, Lula signaled with his letter that he would not, as some feared, default on the country’s debt (a prior demand of the PT). He would not be some Brazilian version of an out-and-out Marxist like Fidel Castro, who spent decades insisting that the debt of Latin America and other “Third World” countries should simply be abolished and with whom socialist Hugo Chávez had aligned Venezuela against the global capitalist order. This moderating stance was quite a shift for Lula, with his history of union rabble-rousing and his notable friendship with Castro, who had encouraged Lula not to abandon Brazil’s working class during a nadir in his political morale ahead of his first election to Congress in 1986. 

On October 27, 2002, Lula won a runoff against José Serra to become President of Brazil. He had the distinction of being the first left or center-left candidate to win the office since the fall of the country’s most recent dictatorship, which began in 1964 after a U.S.-supported military coup and lasted until 1985. After Venezuela’s election of Hugo Chávez in 1998, Lula was the second in a line of left or center-left leaders—like Argentina’s Néstor Kirchner or Bolivia’s Evo Morales—who rose to power across Latin America early in the new millennium, a trend that would soon be christened the “Pink Tide.” 

Less than two weeks later, another open letter appeared, this one entitled “Letter to the Brazilian People and President Lula,” on the website of the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais sem Terra (MST), or Landless Workers Movement. Dating from the mid-1980s (just a little younger than the PT), the MST is Brazil’s largest left-wing organization, centered around a long-term Marxist campaign for agrarian reform and self-sufficiency for the rural poor. Celebrating Lula’s election as a rebuke to the reigning economic system, the MST proceeded to call for the democratization of land ownership in Brazil, where even today two-thirds of arable land is owned by just 3 percent of the population. Though their letter didn’t directly call out Lula’s class-conciliatory attitude as laid out in the “Letter to the Brazilian People,” Brazil’s most prominent left-wing organization implicitly refuted any such approach by issuing clear and direct demands for radical transformation. It was one of the first of many dissensions among Brazil’s broad political left accusing Lula and his party, directly or indirectly, of having betrayed their radical roots. 

And yet, near the end of Lula’s second term in 2009, Barack Obama would call him “the most popular politician on earth.” He wasn’t exaggerating: when Lula left office in 2010, numerous polls put his approval rating close to 90 percent. Whatever his political ideology, it’s undeniable that, under his administration, something had gone right. By any traditional metrics Brazil’s economy was booming, and poverty had significantly decreased after Lula’s eight years in office. 

Fourteen years later, Lula is once again the president of Brazil. But much has changed in the intervening years: an impeachment—or coup, depending who you ask—of Dilma Rousseff, Lula’s left-wing successor; the subsequent election of right-wing extremist Jair Bolsonaro; and Lula’s imprisonment-then-release for corruption charges the validity of which has been hotly debated. Now, Lula governs arguably even more moderately than before, and his popularity is nowhere near as unanimous as it once was: one recent poll puts popular approval of his current government at just 33 percent. 

Who, then, is Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and what kind of journey brought him from the child of poor farmers to “the most popular politician in the world,” to imprisonment, release, and reelection? What does his rise say about Brazil and Latin America, and what might his career teach us about the Left? 

'Just a Latin American Boy'

Lula was born on October 27, 1945, in Caetés, in the rural interior of the state of Pernambuco. The seventh of eight children, he was born to a family of farmers in the agreste, a narrow slice of the Brazilian northeast nestled between the temperate coast to the east and the more arid sertão (“backwoods”) to the west.¹ Though the agreste is less drought-prone than the infamously dry and rugged sertão, Lula’s mother moved their family to São Paulo in search of greater economic opportunity. Having quit school in second grade to help contribute income to his poor family, Lula spent his youth in toil, not even learning to read until he was 10. First working informally as a shoe shiner and street vendor, he took his first formal job at age 14 in a warehouse before transitioning to metallurgy, where he proceeded to spend the rest of his working life. 

Inspired by his brother José Ferreira’s membership in the Brazilian Communist Party, Lula became increasingly involved in the labor movement until his eventual election in 1975 as the president of the Sindicato dos Metalúrgicos do ABC, the union of metalworkers in the ABC (a cluster of industrial neighborhoods in Greater São Paulo). Though he began his career with a more conciliatory approach, Lula grew more adversarial upon his reelection and organized several major strike actions, demanding better wages and safer working conditions that would lead to fewer injuries. (Lula himself lost a finger on the job early in his career.) The country was still in the throes of military rule, and the country’s strike-suppressing labor courts ruled the strikes illegal and jailed Lula for a month in 1980 for his role as their leader. That same year, Lula joined several fellow union leaders and progressive academics to found the Partido dos Trabalhadores (Workers’ Party, or PT), marking the beginning of his formal political career. Adopting a radical posture and rhetoric calling for “massas em luta”—masses in struggle—the PT held as central to their project the belief that the working class needed an autonomous political entity that could advocate for socialist reform and workers’ rights. In August of 1980, Lula said in one speech: “The PT is a very practical thing. [...] We are in need of an instrument, a tool, to open space for the political participation of the worker. And the PT is that!” 

As Brazil transitioned from dictatorship to democracy throughout the early 1980s, the PT gained crucial ballot access, allowing Lula to run for office several times throughout the ’80s and ’90s. He was elected to the National Congress in 1986 and ran three unsuccessful campaigns for the Brazilian presidency: in 1989, 1994, and 1998. As both a member of Congress and a presidential candidate, Lula advocated numerous political positions that were viewed as radical: demanding the right to strike, minimum wage hikes, paid parental leave, the nationalization of the country’s considerable natural assets (including its oil and mineral reserves), and agrarian reform. The latter was particularly radical in a country where the vast majority of land is in the hands of a small number of latifundiários (large-scale landowners). Ironically given his radical positions, it was also during this period in which Lula first gained his reputation as a skilled negotiator, someone who could work with politicians across the spectrum. It was a sign—or an omen?—of the political posture he would take as president. 

Meticulously detailed in a biography by Fernando Morais (soon to be published in Brian Mier’s English translation by Verso), Lula’s life story is crucial to understanding his rise—especially given its similarity to the experience of so many of Brazil’s most downtrodden and vulnerable. In the most obvious sense, Lula grew up with close to nothing, a relatable situation in a country where nearly 50 percent of the population lived in poverty in 2002, the year of Lula’s first election. (The number has since decreased dramatically, though it still represents more than a quarter of the 220 million inhabitants of South America’s largest country.) More specifically, Lula’s background is typical of the less-developed Brazilian Northeast, the region of his most consistent support. Lula and his family’s relocation from the rural agreste to the then-burgeoning metropolis of São Paulo (now the world’s fifth-largest city and one of a handful of the world’s megalopolises) mirrors broader Brazilian demographic trends since the 1950s in which rural populations have consistently thinned while urban centers have exploded, often in the form of large communities of informal housing called favelas. 

We might read Lula’s life story through the lens of one classic anthem of Brazilian popular music, Belchior’s “Apenas um Rapaz Latino-americano” (“Just a Latin American Boy”). The singer chronicles his move from the country’s more rural Northeast down to São Paulo in search of a better life, singing, “I’m just a Latin American boy / No money in the bank / No important family members / Leaving the interior.” Where Belchior channeled his background into art, Lula fought to build a workers’ movement, hoping to even the playing field across one of the world’s most unequal countries. 

A Brief History of Brazilian Politics

Before Lula, Brazil had only two periods that we might consider even vaguely left wing. The first was the Vargas era, named for Getúlio Vargas, who ruled the country off and on from 1930 to 1954—sometimes as an elected president, sometimes as a military-backed dictator. His Estado Novo (“New State”), which lasted from 1937 to 1945, was named after Salazar’s fascist regime in Portugal, and it was heavily dictatorial, even quasi-fascist in its own right. But Vargas at least made overtures to the poor with populist rhetoric, secured numerous workers’ rights, and invested significant government spending in the economy—particularly in industrialization. 

Though far from communist, the late 1950s and early 1960s saw a left-wing tilt in Brazil, enough to scare local elites and communism-fearing Washington officials. Working in tandem, these bourgeois elements engineered a successful military coup in 1964 to depose President João Goulart before he could enact a proposed slate of agrarian, educational, and enfranchisement reforms. Even after the country’s transition from dictatorship to full democracy throughout the 1980s, Brazil, like many of its South American neighbors, was the victim of neoliberal restructuring that placed control of many natural resources in the hands of predatory multinational corporations. One example was the privatization of Vale, one of Brazil’s state-run oil companies, by Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Lula’s predecessor. Such privatizations sent inequality spiraling throughout the 1990s—the time of the so-called “end of history,” when the obvious supremacy of liberal democratic capitalism was supposed to guarantee global economic security (as compared to the failed “socialism” of the recently fallen Soviet Union). 

Scholars like Wendy Hunter, the author of The Transformation of the Workers’ Party in Brazil, 1989-2009, have pointed out this historical context as a possible explanation for the rightward drift of initially radical parties like the PT. In a post-Soviet era, capitalism tightened its grip, exacting an immense toll on the world’s workers. Neoliberal Latin American governments deregulated national industries and sold off control of their natural resources to multinational corporate behemoths, a set of moves that came to be known as the “Washington Consensus.” With no real alternative economic model, as there had been before the fall of the USSR (and the market liberalization of China), the continuing worldwide dominance of global, Western-led capitalism seemed more solid than it had since the Russian Revolution. 

Illustration by Tom Humberstone

It was under these circumstances that the leaders of the Pink Tide came to power. Latin America was suffering under globalized capitalism and needed urgent help, but to challenge the economic system of the world’s primary superpower might have seemed borderline suicidal to Latin American leftists who wanted to secure some relief for their embattled working classes. Though radical in background and principle, Lula and the PT might have moderated after assessing that their purer crusading wasn’t getting them to the heights of power, where they needed to be if they wanted to get anything done. As a cautionary example of where a stronger stance could lead, they could see the ravaging effects on the Cuban people of the Washington-led economic embargo on Cuba. As a consequence, they might have judged head-on conflict with Washington as unwise, instead opting for a more conciliatory approach out of perceived necessity. Full-on neoliberalism was unacceptable, but full-on socialism might be too impractical, or too dangerous. Maybe instead, parties like the PT could find a sweet spot from which they could extract some meaningful concessions from the world’s capitalist class. 

Such is the basis of the term “Pink Tide”: not boldly socialist enough to earn the moniker of “red,” but connected enough to leftist rhetoric and ideology to gesture that way. Perhaps the exception is Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez, whose commitment to both class warfare and anti-U.S. foreign policy was significantly more adversarial. In this light, it’s easy to understand the frequent left-wing criticism that has been leveled against leaders like Lula or Bolivia’s Evo Morales, whom indigenous activist Felipe Quispe has accused of practicing “neoliberalism with an indigenous face” by not sufficiently challenging foreign and Bolivian capitalist elites. Although right-wing critics (and some left-wing champions) are prone to comparing Pink Tide leaders to out-and-out communists like Castro or Chile’s Salvador Allende, Lula and his contemporaries should perhaps be more aptly compared to the long tradition of Latin American populists like the aforementioned Getúlio Vargas or Argentina’s Juan Perón. Their coalitions and governing styles always had both right-wing and left-wing elements, but they consistently embraced a proud posture of nationalist independence and strong workers’ rights (though the Pink Tide largely lacks the fascist overtones). 

Whatever their posturing, each of these leaders rose to office looking to strike a better deal for their countries and their peoples. Whether they got one remains an open question. 

Lula Takes the Reins

Ahead of his fourth presidential campaign in 2002, Lula and the PT hoped to expand their base of support beyond their traditional constituency of left-wing activists, intellectuals, and union militants by adopting a more conciliatory approach. One move in this direction was the selection of José Alencar, a businessman and center-right politician who believed in liberalizing financial markets and deregulating production industries, as Lula’s running mate. Before long, the PT’s moderating strategy paid off: Lula and Alencar were elected in 2002 and again in 2006, by a comfortable margin both times.

It was clear from the outset that Lula would not direct his government with the same antagonism as he directed anti-dictatorship strikes in the 1970s and ’80s. Nonetheless, it’s not a complete stretch to describe Lula’s first government as having a revolutionary impact on many people given the slate of reforms and social programs he introduced across his first eight years as president. The flagship of these was the bolsa família, or family stipend. Targeted towards Brazil’s most destitute, the bolsa família required potential recipients to demonstrate two basic requirements: that their children were regularly attending school and were up to date on their vaccinations. In return, compliant families received direct cash assistance in amounts that would seem meager by first-world standards but were revolutionary for Brazil’s most destitute.

Lula’s government made the process simple, streamlined, and direct. Thus, the aid was able to reach the people who needed it the most. Furthermore, studies have shown that the program has drastically cut rates of things like child labor, domestic abuse, and school dropouts. One beneficiary interviewed by the World Bank described how the bolsa família “has been a marvelous thing for me and my family,” saying that “My children know that when we receive the money, they will have more to eat, and that makes them happier. And they don't skip school, because they know that the money depends on their going.” Still, the bolsa família is technocratic, not redistributive; liberal, not socialist. Cash transfers enable people to increase their purchasing power, which can make a profound difference in their ability to buy basic necessities, but they do nothing to change the way goods are produced or to make them more available or less costly. Nonetheless, the bolsa família made a tangible impact, at least in the short term. By one estimate, the program helped lift more than 40 million Brazilians out of extreme poverty from its introduction to the end of Lula’s presidency.²

Another area in which Lula was relatively left wing was in his foreign policy. Reversing his predecessor’s focus on relations with the United States, Lula’s government realigned Brazil’s diplomatic and trade orientation with other developing countries in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. Unlike his Pink Tide comrade Hugo Chávez, however, he did not take a directly antagonistic stance against the United States. They were even outright cooperative at times, giving their support to the 2004 Franco-American coup of the constitutional Aristide government in Haiti. Lula and the PT’s left-wing bona fides were strong, but their successes were perhaps only possible because they did not overwhelmingly affect federal budget concerns (on the whole, the bolsa família didn’t cost all that much, for example) or directly challenge the entrenched power of capital. Simply put, the risk was not that high to be somewhat left wing on foreign policy, not in the same way it would have been to overhaul the country’s economic or political structures. 

Though Lula’s social programs and foreign policy were and remain notable, just as notable is the absence of any number of left-wing reforms expected from a governing party with such radical roots. There was no significant land reform; no change to the basic tax structure that heavily favors elites and the rich; no attempt to break up the monopolies that keep the Brazilian media in the hands of a few large companies. Instead, Lula relied on the economy’s explosive growth throughout his presidency, which aligned with a worldwide commodities boom. Driven heavily by Chinese development and expansion of industry throughout the aughts, this commodities boom pumped money into the Brazilian economy as it exported large quantities of raw materials like lumber or soy. While doing little to directly challenge the broader political and economic structures that continue to lie at the root of Brazil’s massive and spiraling economic inequality, Lula’s center-left government was able to capitalize on a growing economy to both expand social programs for the country’s poorest and earn kudos from the country’s more well-off sectors. 

Beyond the economic sphere, Lula’s government did not make any meaningful reforms to Brazil’s democratic institutions, despite such a proposal having been a cornerstone of his winning electoral campaign. Though the PT had helped to institute successful smaller-scale models of participatory budgeting in numerous communities across Brazil, Lula’s government didn’t undertake anything similar on a national level, and all other introduced reforms were watered down virtually beyond recognition through the legislative process. With a minority of congressional seats, the PT had to resort to the more typical Brazilian coalition strategy of literally paying members of opposing political parties to pass legislation, a practice often referred to as “buying votes.” Typical of Brazilian democracy, this practice nonetheless led to 2005’s Mensalão (a Portuguese neologism for “big monthly payment") scandal in which the PT was accused of buying votes for specific pieces of tax reform legislation. The scandal did not affect Lula’s reelection the following year, but it did cause a wave of resignations among PT members and cast the first shadow across the PT’s image as “the good party,” a shadow that has only grown since. Of all the missed opportunities of the first Lula government, the lack of democracy reform was probably the one with the greatest immediate consequences for both the PT and the country, given the way right-wing actors have increasingly manipulated Brazil’s fragile democratic institutions for nefarious political ends.

But at the time, it hardly mattered. Lula’s moderation did catalyze significant left-wing dissent both within and outside of his party, even leading to some PT members forming breakaway parties like the Partido do Socialismo e Liberação (Socialism and Liberation Party) in protest of the PT’s perceived deradicalization. But most voters and outside observers didn’t care that Lula had moderated. His government was reaping the fruits of the aforementioned commodities boom in a way that tangibly improved the lives of Brazil’s poorest—who became an integral part of his coalition from 2006 on—while still catering to the desire for economic growth of Brazil’s wealthiest. Lula was unstoppable, and so it seemed was his Brazil. According to at least one poll, he left office in 2010 with a 90 percent approval rating. 

Dilma Rousseff, Operation Carwash, and Jair Bolsonaro

Limited to two consecutive terms by the Brazilian constitution, Lula handpicked Dilma Rousseff, a member of his cabinet, as his successor and PT’s new standard-bearer. Bolstered by Lula’s popularity and legislative successes, she won her election comfortably in 2010 to become Brazil’s first woman president. 

Dilma and Lula make an interesting contrast. Whereas Lula came from extreme poverty and had little formal education, Dilma came from an upper middle-class background and became a socialist in her youth, eventually opting to join an armed Marxist guerrilla movement—a decision which led to her being jailed and tortured by the military dictatorship in 1970. She later helped found the Democratic Labor Party, which she left for the PT in 2001 to serve as Lula’s electoral energy advisor. When he became president, she served in his cabinet as energy minister and then chief of staff. 

Though never as beloved as Lula’s, Dilma’s government was relatively popular at the outset, since she was seen as being in continuity with her predecessor. Her popularity took a dip, though, starting with a series of protests in 2013 and 2014. These began as a demand for fareless public transportation but soon expanded into broader protests against low government spending on public services, particularly given the vast sums of money dedicated to the 2014 FIFA World Cup and 2016 Summer Olympics. Aligning with a cooldown of the global commodities boom and a subsequent slowdown of Brazil’s economic growth, the explosion of protests under Dilma showed how popular left-wing sympathy for the deradicalized and institutionalized PT was starting to run out. Nonetheless, Dilma won reelection in 2014 against her center-right opponent Aécio Neves, though PT remained without a congressional majority. 

The spring of 2014 also marked the beginning of Operação Lava Jato, or Operation Car Wash. This was a large-scale anti-corruption investigation undertaken by a task force of tax revenue auditors, antitrust regulators, and Brazil’s federal police. Initially painted as nonpartisan, Lava Jato implicated numerous elected officials across the political spectrum: senators, state governors, federal ministers, even former presidents (more on that in a minute). Following the initial reporting of Lava Jato in the press, popular discontent erupted in 2015 in response to Dilma and the PT’s perceived corruption in greater force than ever. Once again, hundreds of thousands of Brazilians came out in the streets to protest. Capitalizing on the energy of the moment, a right-wing legislature moved against Dilma and the PT, whose class-conciliatory attitude was still too far left for the reigning capitalist political and economic classes. Though formally accusing Dilma merely of “creative accounting,” pro-impeachment senators and representatives cast their “yes” votes in the name of things like God, Brazil’s evangelicals, family values, and anti-communism. Perhaps most chilling is the footage of then-Senator Jair Bolsonaro, who cast his yes vote while invoking the name of the specific military colonel who tortured Dilma for weeks on end. After numerous thorny hearings, accusations, and debates, and a formal impeachment on April 17, 2016, the Senate voted on August 31 to convict Dilma, 61-20. She was removed from office and replaced by her vice president Michel Temer, a center-right politician (picked as Dilma’s VP in the same way Lula teamed up with Alencar). He was even less popular than Dilma. 

Initially, Lava Jato was largely portrayed as a landmark anti-corruption effort in a country whose political system has long been corrupt. But as time went on, it became increasingly clear that Operation Car Wash was in fact highly politicized. Just a few months after Dilma’s impeachment, a leaked audio recording surfaced in which two right-wing politicians discussed the need to remove Dilma and install Temer in order to save their own skins. The summer of 2019 dropped an even bigger bomb on the situation when Glenn Greenwald reported for the Intercept Brasil on text messages that showed the degree of out-and-out cooperation—dare we say, corruption?—between the investigators and right-wing elements of the Brazilian government. In particular, Lava Jato prosecutor and judge Sergio Moro—who had initially been regarded as a heroic and non-partisan figure—ultimately took a position within Jair Bolsonaro’s far-right government (though he soon resigned after a series of disputes with the neofascist). Many Brazilian and international observers have described the impeachment process as a political coup enacted not through armed military takeover but through “lawfare,” the achievement nefarious political goals through legalistic means. 

It’s not that the PT wasn’t corrupt, of course. Instead, it’s important to place their corruption in the context of Brazil’s political system. In a democracy like the United States, there exists an open and legalized form of corruption wherein wealthy lobbyists make significant campaign donations to Democratic and Republican politicians, who in turn write bills and laws with such donors in mind. Though wildly antidemocratic, this normalized corruption is technically legal and above board. Brazil, however, takes it one step further. Corruption is even more widespread and more of an open secret, and everyone is aware of the prominence of bribes. To say that Dilma, Lula, and the PT were corrupt is essentially true, but it is also bereft of context. Of the 61 senators who went on to vote for Dilma’s impeachment, more than half of them were themselves openly under investigation for, or being accused of, corruption or other crimes. 

From a left-wing point of view, I find it hard to fault Lula, Dilma, and the PT for playing by the rules of a sick game in order to score a few points for the country’s poor and vulnerable, especially considering all their opponents were playing the same game. What I find harder to excuse is their lack of a meaningful challenge to the rulebook. Particularly with the benefit of hindsight, it shouldn’t be a surprise that the PT’s pseudo-corrupt, class-conciliatory strategy provoked a response from an extreme right wing that has no interest in democracy, save as an occasional rhetorical device. Simply put, while the PT is at fault for playing dirty, just as everyone else in the political system is, that fact alone should not be the focus of our analysis. If we should fault them strongly, it should be for playing at all, for not being more forceful in calling out the rigged game and mobilizing popular support as leverage to change the way it’s played. 

The golpistas—or coup perpetrators—didn’t stop with Dilma. In 2017, Lula was convicted on charges of money laundering, also as part of Operation Car Wash. His persecutors made the case that his position as president made him functionally the ringleader of all the previously prosecuted corruption, but Lula was technically only charged for not being able to produce a deed for an apartment that he owned. Lula affirmed his innocence throughout the process but was unable to escape conviction. Not only did the charges bar him from running again for president in 2018, in an election that polls predicted he would win comfortably, but Lula was ultimately sentenced to 12 years in prison. The sentencing caused a massive uproar among his supporters, both throughout Brazil and across the world, in a movement that became known as Lula Livre (Free Lula). Ultimately, he was released early in light of the revelations in Glenn Greenwald’s reporting for Intercept Brasil, but by then it was too late. In 2018, far-right politician Jair Bolsonaro was elected president of Brazil.

'In Search of Spring': Lula's Political Fate

“I have to regret many things,” says Lula in The Edge of Democracy, a documentary by Petra Costa about Dilma’s impeachment proceedings and Lula’s imprisonment. “But one regret I have: not having done more.” Luckily for him, he has another chance. 

Lula beat Bolsonaro in 2022 by running on a platform of moderation, emphasizing that he would protect democracy against Bolsonaro’s neofascist backsliding. This time around, however, Lula’s government has conceded even more to the right wing than in his first two terms, a move uncomfortably reminiscent of the modern Democratic Party’s frequent overtures to bipartisanship in Washington. Lula himself remains a relatively popular figure, but his party’s popular regard and influence have deteriorated after two decades of disappointments and scandals. Though decidedly better than the horrific Bolsonaro alternative, Lula’s government seems even less likely to make the necessary radical moves that an inequality-wracked Brazil so desperately needs. In April of this year, just before I left Brazil after a year living in Minas Gerais, workers at the university where I used to teach had decided to go on strike, along with hundreds of other federal universities across the country. According to my friends involved, former labor leader Lula and his government were being significantly less cooperative than the striking workers had hoped. 

After significant research about Lula and the Partido dos Trabalhadores, I have come away with two relatively solid conclusions. The first is that Lula and his broad cohort seem genuine in their beliefs and their desires to create a better Brazil for poor and working people. Decades of militancy in the labor unions (and guerrilla movements, in Dilma’s case) can attest to this fact. The second is that—whether from lack of will, fear of capitalist retribution, or simply a misguided strategy overestimating the power of conciliation—they have fallen short. As meaningful as programs like the bolsa família have been to millions of Brazilian families, Lula and the PT have strayed far from their original radicalism. However genuine a socialist Lula probably is in his heart of hearts, he made the political calculation to gain and keep power on the edges of social democracy instead of shooting for more risky political goals that might have had the potential for higher reward. 

We’ll never know if a more militant President Lula might have actually been able to break through economic and political barriers to yield a more just and equal Brazil. Perhaps a continuously radical Partido dos Trabalhadores might never have gotten into power to enact even meager reforms, and the country would be even worse off than today. But we might wonder whether Brazil’s newly emboldened far right has outweighed or counteracted even the short-term gains Lula and his party did achieve, or whether a less conciliatory strategy on the PT’s part might have done something to prevent the rise of a figure like Bolsonaro in the first place. 

In assessing Lula’s successes and failures, I found myself continually thinking of Bernie Sanders. To anyone who’s heard the man speak in a rally or an interview, or who’s familiar with his history of left-wing activism and governing, it’s hard to deny that Bernie is genuine in his commitments. His genuine belief didn’t stop him, however, from bending the knee to Hillary Clinton in 2016 or Joe Biden in 2020 in support of the centrist Democrats, whether out of fear of the Republican neofascist specter or hope that a Democratic government would be more friendly to his political goals. In both Lula and Bernie we find the classic left-wing crux, the communist catch-22: to get into power, you might have to cool down your most radical ambitions, but if you cool down too much, you might lose sight of the very reason for getting into politics in the first place. Bernie has more of an excuse for his submission, having lost his election (relatively) fair and square. Lula and the PT won. Why didn’t they act more like it?

As demoralizing as the situation may seem, it would be a mistake to think all is for naught. Speaking on the eve of his imprisonment in 2018 to a crowd of supporters, Lula announced his intentions to submit to his impending arrest out of respect for the rule of law despite his assertion of his innocence. His hoarse voice brimming with passion, on the cusp of breaking, he said, “The powerful can kill one, two, or a hundred roses, but they’ll never stop the arrival of spring. Our fight is in search of spring.” 

The hope for a truly just world will never reside with a single politician or party. It has to come from below, from a people hungry for justice who won’t take no for an answer. The good news is that there’s a whole swath of the Brazilian people that have come of age in the time of Lula. Yes, Lula could have done more to engage the disaffected and marshal the masses as leverage against the entrenched power of capital, but that doesn’t mean his example has had no effect. Even with the disappointment of Lula’s later years, the spirit that he and his fellow workers first brought to their strikes against the dictatorship lingers on. It must. 

 “It’s no use trying to stop me from traveling around this country [to continue fighting],” Lula said in that moment. “Because there are millions and millions of Lulas… to do it for me.” Lula as a politician may have outlived his utility, but what if he were considered less an apex and more a starting point? Lula may have already played his part, but the “millions and millions of Lulas” he helped create—they’re just getting started. 

notes

1. 
Like the agreste, the sertão is a biome considered unique to Brazil. Both, particularly the latter, are broadly synonymous with poverty and misery within the Brazilian lexicon in contrast to the more culturally famous and economically stimulated Brazilian coastline, particularly in the country’s more developed South/Southeast. 
2.
The bolsa família was the opposite of the welfare reform enacted in the 1990s by U.S. President Bill Clinton, who promised to “end welfare as we have come to know it.” Instead of making it more accessible, Clinton’s administration made the welfare process increasingly bureaucratic and difficult (not to mention humiliating) to receive on the front end through long processes and extensive means testing, like minimum work requirements, while leaving it less generous on the back end, only exacerbating poverty.