Lula, the incombustible leader back in power in Brazil

Leftist Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva returned to power in Brazil for the third time on Sunday, who had left with record popularity before a corruption scandal send him to jail and almost to the political grave.

The achievement of a third term moved this self-defined “young” of 77 years, who could not contain his tears during the certification of his election in December, after narrowly beating (50.9% to 49.1%) the outgoing president, the far-right Jair Bolsonaro.

After his time in prison and the annulment of his sentences, which many interpreted as his end, Lula, the icon of the Brazilian and Latin American left returns to the forefront of politics.

From 2003 to 2010, he ruled the largest power in Latin America, leaving office with an approval rating never seen before, at 87%.

The former union leader was praised for managing a commodity price bonanza that helped lift 30 million Brazilians out of poverty.

But later, luck changed for the former shoeshine boy.

Condemned for corruption in the “Lava Jato”, the biggest political scandal in the country’s history, he was imprisoned for 580 daysfrom April 2018 to November 2019.

The top figure of the Workers’ Party (PT) maintains that was the victim of a political revenge that allowed the triumph of Bolsonaro in the 2018 elections, when he was a great favorite.

But the clouds of his political life began to dissipate in March 2021. The Supreme Court annulled his convictions and restored his political rights.

The high court’s decision, however, did not find Lula innocent in investigations into bribes paid to politicians to win contracts at state oil company Petrobras.

sixth presidential campaign

But 12 years after leaving power, this raspy-voiced orator who suffered from laryngeal cancer ran his sixth presidential campaignthe third successful.

He announces to the world that “Brazil is back” on the international scene, especially with its environmental commitments, while he promises to unite its citizens, after a tense mandate from Bolsonaro that further polarized society.

In his first speech after being inaugurated, on Sunday, he promised “rebuild the country together with the Brazilian people“.

Lula, with the most famous beard in Brazilian politics, it is very popular in the poorer regions of the northeast, where the memory of its aid programs lingers.

But he is hated by a part of the Brazilians, for whom it represents above all the stigma of corruption.

Few turns of this incomparable roller coaster were announced in its origins.

Seventh child of a marriage of illiterate peasants, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was born on October 27, 1945 in northeastern Brazil..

their father left before the family emigrated to the industrialized metropolis of Sao Paulo.

Turner since he was 14 years old, a trade that left him without his left little finger when manipulating a machine, he commanded at the end of the 1970s, at the head of the metalworkers union, a historic strike that challenged the military dictatorship (1964-1985).

In the following decades he monopolized the leadership of the Brazilian left.

He disputed the presidential elections of 1989, the first after the democratic restoration, and narrowly won. He tried again in 1994 and 1998, unsuccessfully. The triumph came in 2002 and he was re-elected in 2006.

First Brazilian president to come out of the working class, carried out ambitious social programs financed by the millionaire income from raw materials.

It also repositioned the image of Brazil in the world, by forming the group of emerging BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa), and especially by hosting the 2014 World Cup and the Rio-2016 Games.

Known for his political negotiation skills, was put to the test this month in the composition of his cabinetwhich he finally completed on Thursday with 37 ministries (against the current 23) and 11 female ministers, a record.

This ex-smoker suffered laryngeal cancer in 2011.

In 2017, he was widowed for the second time when his wife Marisa Leticia Rocco diedfirst lady during his two governments.

Father of five children, he remarried in May to Rosangela da Silva, “Janja”, a sociologist and PT activist, 21 years his junior.

Since then he repeats that he has “the energy of a 30-year-old man and the desire of a 20-year-old“.