Lula has defined Brazil’s left for decades. Can his movement survive another Bolsonaro?

CNN

By Alessandra Freitas, CNN

When Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva walked out of the Federal Police headquarters in Curitiba, Brazil, on November 8, 2019, hundreds of supporters were waiting for him.

Many had been there, on and off, for much of the 580 days he spent behind bars, keeping vigil outside the building and calling out “good morning,” “good afternoon” and “good night” as they defended his innocence and demanded his freedom.

Lula emerged into the crowd and did what he had done best throughout his political life: he gave a speech. “They didn’t imprison a man,” he declared. “They tried to kill an idea. But you can’t kill an idea.”

Seven years later, Lula is Brazil’s president and is again fighting to prove that the ideas of his movement can break through the country’s deep polarization, a wave of new corruption investigations, clashes with the United States and a resurgent right sweeping through Latin America.

On Sunday, he will make his fourth and likely last run for the presidency in a runoff vote against right-wing Senator Flávio Bolsonaro, the eldest son of former president Jair Bolsonaro who is now serving a sentence for plotting to overturn the 2022 election that he lost to Lula.

Lula has a steep hill to climb after an unexpected first-round result in early October where he finished behind Flávio, with 45.16% of votes to the senator’s 47.03%.

Polls now show the two running neck-and-neck in a race marked by sharply different visions for Brazil’s economy, security and place in the world.

The headwinds are a lot for anyone to survive, let alone an almost 81-year-old who recently battled cancer for the second time. But as a figure whose trajectory spanned Brazil’s transition from military rule to democracy, sweeping social and economic change, and repeated political crises –– Lula is no stranger to making a comeback.

A walking metamorphosis

Born in 1945 to a poor family in the rural northeastern state of Pernambuco, Lula was the seventh of eight children. When he was seven, they moved to southeastern Brazil in search of a better life, where Lula worked shining shoes before becoming a metalworker in the industrial belt outside São Paulo – the birthplace of his political career.

It was at those factory halls that Lula lost part of his left little finger in a workplace accident in 1964, reshaping his hand into what would become a proud symbol of his working-class identity. It’s also where he learned to command crowds after becoming a union leader in the 1970s. A natural speaker, he often addressed striking metalworkers during the final years of Brazil’s military dictatorship, when he was arrested for 31 days under the National Security Law after a 1980 strike.

“He is a walking metamorphosis,” said Ricardo Kotscho, invoking the title of a famous song by rock musician Raul Seixas. The veteran Brazilian journalist and longtime friend, who served as Lula’s press secretary during his first term, met Lula in 1978, when he was assigned to cover him as he rose to prominence as a São Paulo union leader. “He made fun of my long beard,” he recalled. “’Here comes another college-educated bearded guy to pester me.’” They instantly became friends.

“He is very funny and very mischievous,” Kotscho said. “He has also always been stubborn.”

That stubbornness gave him the ability to articulate different sides toward a greater goal. “As a union leader, he had to learn to negotiate with the workers, the bosses, with the government, and it was a fragile situation,” Kotscho told CNN.

Yet, Lula insisted he had no interest in becoming a politician. “He told me around 1978 that union leaders should stay out of politics,” Kotscho said.

Two years later, Lula helped found the Workers’ Party, or PT, born out of Brazil’s labor movement.

By 1989, he was running for president. He ran again in 1994 and 1998 and lost all three times. In 2002, he knew things had to change. He built alliances outside the party and its ideology, and became a more conciliatory candidate, reaching out to business leaders and softening his speech.

“He even agreed to using a teleprompter, which he had always been against,” Kotscho told CNN.

And finally, he won.

A controversial legacy

The capacity for unlikely alliances has followed Lula through politics. In 2022, he chose Geraldo Alckmin as his running mate – a former leader of the center-right PSDB, PT’s biggest rival for much of the 2000s, who had run and lost against Lula in 2006. Alckmin is again on the ticket this year.

“What he does is he operates around, creating a space of convergence around him… which all sorts of contradictory forces can operate,” said John French, a historian and professor at Duke University who has studied Lula and Brazil’s labor movement for decades. “He’s very big on maintaining relationships. He’s not like somebody who cuts off ties.”

That skill, along with his social programs, became a staple of his presidency. During his two terms, from 2002 to 2006, Brazil saw rising employment, a higher minimum wage and a major expansion of consumer power among poorer Brazilians, according to Brazil’s official census. Millions rose out of poverty, while more lower-income and Black Brazilians entered universities and spaces long dominated by the middle and upper classes. Brazil was also removed from the United Nations’ hunger map for the first time in 2014.

Lula also raised Brazil’s profile abroad, deepening ties with developing nations while maintaining relationships with the US and Europe, and helped found the BRICS group with China, Russia, India and South Africa. During a G20 meeting in 2009, then US President Barack Obama pointed Lula out to other leaders and called him “the most popular politician on Earth.”

But corruption also became a mark of his government — an awkward turn for a party that had spent its opposition years campaigning on clean government. In 2005, a vote-buying scheme known as Mensalão led to the conviction of senior PT figures and stained the party’s image. Even though Lula himself was never charged, the damage to the party’s image was severe. Under his successor, Dilma Rousseff, a much larger corruption probe that started at a gas station and was then named Lava Jato, or Operation Car Wash, uncovered a kickback scheme at state oil company Petrobras so sprawling it helped drive Rousseff’s 2016 impeachment.

“Corruption became a kind of explanation for the economic crisis, and it became associated with PT,” said Luciano Da Ros, a political scientist and co-author of “Brazilian Politics on Trial.”

Lula was eventually convicted of corruption and money laundering in Curitiba in 2017, in a case involving a luxury beachfront apartment prosecutors alleged builder OAS had promised him for favors. He denied wrongdoing and still sought to run that year, but the conviction made him ineligible. Brazil’s Supreme Court eventually annulled the decision in 2021, ruling the Curitiba court lacked jurisdiction, and restored his political rights – just in time for another election.

He then won in 2022 by a razor-thin 1.8 points — about 2.1 million votes, the closest presidential election in Brazilian history. Although Bolsonaro lost, Bolsonarism is still very much alive and winning votes, mobilizing a growing conservative electorate fiercely opposed to Lula and the PT, which many now see as the “party of corruption.”

“The fact is that corruption is cross-partisan, spread across all the major parties,” Da Ros said. “But the anti-corruption rhetoric once associated with the Brazilian left was very successfully taken by the right.”

A new survival test

A new corruption investigation is helping fuel the sentiment as Lula enters the 2026 campaign, leading a divided country amid a wave of institutional turmoil.

The collapse of Brazilian bank Banco Master has reached across the political establishment, including the Supreme Court, just weeks before the vote. Justice Alexandre de Moraes — who battled constantly with Bolsonaro during his government and later oversaw the investigations that convicted him — is now facing questions over alleged ties to the bank’s president. Moraes has denied the allegations. CNN has reached out to him for comment.

Portrayed as a Lula ally for his clashes with Bolsonaro, Moraes’ implication in the scandal gave Bolsonaro’s campaign enough ammunition to play into one of their most-used cards: that the left, and anyone associated with it, is corrupt – although Flávio Bolsonaro himself is also under investigation over alleged ties to the same bank.

That comes as Lula’s own son, known as Lulinha, is separately under investigation for suspected influence-peddling.

Pressure is also coming from outside Brazil, as Lula clashes with the Trump administration over tariffs and trading practices, Brazil’s resources, its view on organized crime and even scrutiny over its technology payment system, PIX.

Trump has imposed new tariffs on Brazilian goods this year, including a 25% levy on some products over what the US described as unfair trade practices. Lula has rejected the allegations while continuing negotiations with Washington, and has increasingly made the defense of Brazilian sovereignty a central point of his campaign. “Brazil doesn’t fit in nobody’s backyard,” he told the UN General Assembly in September.

That comes as Lula tightens ties with China and other BRICS members: Brazil’s exports to China reached $58.3 billion in the first half of 2026, more than triple the $17.4 billion sent to the US, whose share fell 13% as tariffs bit.

Closer to home, Lula has also found himself at odds with a Latin America shifting to the right. In July, Argentina’s President Javier Milei flew to Brazil to campaign alongside Flávio Bolsonaro, calling Lula a “convict” and his government “thieving socialists” — prompting Brazil to recall its ambassador from Argentina.

In Brazil, Lula also faces fading support even among parts of his base as the economic backdrop looks different from the one that accompanied his first presidency. His first two terms saw a global commodities boom that helped fuel growth, wages and employment in Brazil. Today, despite low unemployment and easing inflation, frustration over everyday expenses is weighing on voter’s perception of the economy — and weakening Lula’s support.

Another Lula term would come at a moment of heightened rivalry between the US and China, Brazil’s largest trading partner, as well as wars and instability in Europe and the Middle East and growing tensions over global trade.

A party built around an irreplaceable politician

But even a PT victory won’t delay a problem the left has faced for some time: there is no clear successor to Lula.

For younger Brazilians, French says, Lula has simply always been there. “He’s part of nature,” John French said.

His raspy voice, his beard, his missing finger and the cadence of his speech have been fixtures of Brazilian public life since Brazil’s first direct presidential election after the dictatorship ended in 1985.

He also created an emotional connection with voters who climbed the social ladder during the Lula years – a legacy that may be difficult to replicate.

“His greatest achievement is social inclusion,” French said. “For people who were completely outside the labor market, outside the financial system, who didn’t even have bank accounts.”

Kotscho agrees.

“A guy like Lula, you don’t create, he’s unique,” Kotscho said. “These types only appear every 100 years.”

Whether that’s enough to survive one more election — against a Bolsonaro, a banking scandal, and a region turning against him — is what Brazil might answer on Sunday.

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