Three Weeks That Rewrote the Script
The first-round vote went against him, and the count was public. Three weeks later, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was declared the winner of Brazil’s presidential election — his fourth term, at the age of 80. The candidate he beat in Sunday’s run-off was Flávio Bolsonaro, son of former president Jair Bolsonaro, who is serving a 27-year prison sentence on coup charges. The Bolsonaro camp rejects the result. For this politician it extends a longer pattern: he lost three presidential attempts before winning one. The result itself is not in dispute. The published result settles the outcome; the source gives no account of the mechanism that closed the first-round gap.
Timing is part of the story. Lula turns 81 on Tuesday. When he re-entered office in 2023 he committed to that term being his last, and his party endorsed him again this year regardless. Age is now a governing fact rather than a campaign talking point, because it caps the horizon over which any programme can be planned. The regional backdrop makes the result an outlier: right-wing candidates whose policies mirror those of US President Donald Trump have been winning elections across Latin America, and Brazil’s run-off went the other way. An outlier is information. It is not a trend. One country, one run-off, one candidate with an unusually long record — that is the whole of what this vote establishes about the region.
The mandate is narrower than the headline suggests. Even backers of his Workers’ Party concede that he achieved more in his first two terms — January 2003 to December 2010 — than in the four years of his current one. That is an admission about delivery, not about popularity. He returns to a congress that is hostile to him and to a country that is divided, and neither constraint was dissolved by the run-off; the vote only decided who must govern around them. That is the constraint to watch over the coming term, not the size of the victory speech. Three weeks of momentum wins an election. It does not pass a law.
From Shop Floor to the Presidency
The path to that office started far below it. Lula was born into a poor, illiterate peasant family. As a child he sold peanuts and shined shoes, and he learned to read at 10. He trained as a metalworker and found work in an industrial city near São Paulo, where he lost the little finger of his left hand in an accident in the 1960s. Politics did not interest him at first; trade union activism did. In 1975 he was elected leader of the 100,000-strong Metalworkers’ Union. From that position he changed what a union in Brazil could be, turning organisations that had mostly been friendly to the government into a powerful independent movement. That is the first transferable skill in his record: turning government-friendly organisations into a powerful independent movement.
In 1980 he assembled trade unionists, intellectuals, Trotskyites and Church activists into a single vehicle, the Workers’ Party — the first major socialist party in the country’s history. Over time the party traded its revolutionary commitment to overturning Brazil’s power structure for a pragmatic social democratic platform. That trade matters: the programme that eventually won elections was not the programme founded in 1980. When he took office in 2003 he became Brazil’s first leftist leader in nearly half a century. He had campaigned on major reforms to the political and economic system. He had also promised to eradicate hunger and to build a self-confident, caring, outward-looking nation.
The measurable part of that promise arrived as cash transfers and as wage policy. His government raised the minimum wage well above the rate of inflation. It broadened state help to the poorest households through a family grant programme, Bolsa Familia, reaching some 44 million people. That support cemented his standing among poor voters. The criticism is equally concrete: the programme did not address the structural problems underneath poverty, among them a lack of education. A transfer raises a household’s income; the source notes it did not address structural problems such as a lack of education. He left office in 2010, after two terms, with exceptionally high approval ratings for a departing Latin American leader, having raised Brazil’s international profile and having presided over the longest period of economic growth in three decades. Shortly afterwards he was diagnosed with throat cancer, shaved his trademark beard during treatment, and was declared cured in 2012.
Then the prosecution came. A vast investigation into top-level corruption, known as Operation Car Wash, reshaped the country’s politics, and Lula was caught up in it. In July 2017 he was convicted of corruption and sentenced to more than nine years in prison for accepting a beachside flat as a bribe from the engineering firm OAS. The sentence was increased on appeal to 12 years. A second sentence, of 12 years and 11 months for corruption and money laundering, concerned bribes from two construction and engineering firms paid as improvements to a country house his family used. He has always maintained his innocence and insisted the accusations were politically motivated. In 2019 he was released after serving just over 18 months, after a Supreme Court ruling that the incarceration had been illegal because it came before all appeals were exhausted. The convictions were annulled in 2021, which left him free to run in 2022. He won that election against the right-winger Jair Bolsonaro and returned to office in 2023. The record holds both a conviction and an annulment, and both are facts about the same case.
The Ledger Beyond Brazil’s Borders
The foreign ledger is where much of the current term’s economics gets decided. Lula’s third term overlapped with Trump’s return to office, and by September 2025 there was, on Lula’s own account, no relationship between the two men at all. In July of that year Trump imposed 50% tariffs on Brazilian goods. The US runs a trade surplus with Brazil, so the measure was not a response to a deficit. The trigger cited was the trial on coup charges of Jair Bolsonaro. Lula called it foreign interference, and his phrase for Trump was that “he’s not emperor of the world.” [1] The relationship later improved after a White House meeting in May this year, after which the two leaders exchanged public compliments: Trump’s word for Lula was “dynamic”, and Lula’s account of the meeting was that he left “very satisfied.” [1] In July of this year the US imposed 25% tariffs on most goods from Brazil. The two governments still disagree on key issues such as crime, and Lula has acknowledged they are especially far apart on trade.
Beyond Washington, Lula has pressed a structural complaint. Five countries — the permanent members of the UN Security Council — hold the power to veto decisions, and his argument is that this tilts the balance in favour of the victors of the Second World War while excluding nations representing billions of people, among them Brazil, Germany, India, Japan and African countries. Brazil is an active member of BRICS, the grouping that unites it with Russia, India, China and South Africa. Lula defends his continued alliances with Russia and China and treats the bloc as an emerging counterweight to the West. He has also defended continuing to buy Russian oil while Russia wages war in Ukraine. On Washington’s doctrine of hemispheric dominance — what Trump has called the “Donroe doctrine” — his position is that “Brazil does not fit into anyone’s backyard.” [1] Each of these positions carries a cost, and the oil purchases are the clearest example: an economic relationship on one side of the ledger, and the objections of other governments on the other.
The Amazon is where the domestic and foreign ledgers meet. Before the 2022 election his supporters called him the “saviour of the Amazon” and praised his commitment to protecting the rainforest. Some environmentalists have since criticised his support for exploratory oil drilling in offshore waters near the mouth of the Amazon. His position is that he remains committed to eventually phasing out fossil fuels, and his argument is that oil revenues are key to financing Brazil’s transition to clean energy. That is a claim about sequencing: take the fossil money now, build the non-fossil system with it, and accept the extraction in between. The government’s other evidence is a measurement — satellite data suggests the area deforested in the first half of 2026 fell to its lowest level in the past decade. A decade low is a number, not a verdict on the government’s wider record. What success would look like is nonetheless specific and checkable: the satellite series keeps falling from that 2026 low, and the oil revenue can be traced into the energy transition it is meant to fund. Both halves have to hold at once. A falling deforestation curve financed by new offshore wells is only half of the argument, and it is the half that satellite data can actually verify.
