Lula the
Redeemer
BRAZIL’S FORMER PRESIDENT RETURNS FROM POLITICAL EXILE WITH
A PLAN TO SAVE THE NATION BY CIARA NUGENT/SÃO PAULO
▷
Former Brazilian
President and
2022 presidential
candidate Lula,
photographed
in São Paulo on
March 23WORLD
THE GENRE WE ASSIGN TO A LIFE STORY DEPENDS
a lot on how it ends. Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s life
has already completed several dramatic arcs. First,
the hero’s journey: a child born into poverty moves
to the big city, rises to lead a labor union, and then
becomes the most popular President in the history
of modern Brazil. Then the tragedy: a celebrated
statesman is fingered in a staggering corruption
scheme, sent to prison, and forced to watch from
the sidelines while rivals dismantle his legacy.
The endings don’t seem to stick, though. In
April 2021, Brazil’s Supreme Court annulled the
corruption convictions that had excluded Lula—
as he’s universally known—from politics in 2018,
saying a biased judge on his case had compro-
mised his right to a fair trial. The bombshell deci-
sion set Brazil on course for a showdown between
the leftist Lula and current far-right President Jair
Bolsonaro in the October 2022 elections. Polls
now put the challenger at 45% and the incumbent
at 31%, with more centrist candidates all but out
of the running.
For Lula, who is 76 and had been preparing for
a quieter life away from the halls of power, this
new twist in his story was a surprise. But he didn’t
hesitate to return to frontline politics. “In truth, I
never gave up,” he rumbles in his famously gravelly
voice, made hoarser by age. “Politics lives in every
cell of my body, because I have a cause. And in the
12 years since I left office, I see that all the policies
I created to benefit the poor have been destroyed.”
It’s late March, six weeks before Lula launches
his campaign, and he’s sitting in a studio in the
São Paulo headquarters of his Workers’ Party (PT).
Chuckling and griping that no one knows how to
design a comfortable chair these days, he comes
off as a jovial grandfather. But at his allusion to
the current government, his back stiffens and the
deeper, gruffer notes of his voice take over. Lula
becomes the fiery young union leader he was in the
1970s, and launches into a soapbox-ready tirade.
The dream of Brazil that Lula pursued during
his presidency from 2003 to 2010 lies in tatters, he
says. Through progressive social programs, paid
for by a boom in Brazilian products like steel, soy,
and oil, Lula’s government lifted millions out of
poverty and transformed life for the country’s
Black majority and Indigenous minority. Bolso-
naro has taken a hammer to all that, scrapping
policies that expanded poor people’s access to
education, limited police violence against Black
communities, and protected Indigenous lands
and the Amazon rain forest. COVID-19 has killed
at least 664,000 Brazilians. The toll, the second
highest in the world, was likely worsened by Bol-
sonaro, who called the virus “a little flu,” dubbed
people who followed isolation guidance “idiots,”
and refused to get a vaccine himself and to buy
doses for Brazilians when they first became avail-
able. A December 2020 national survey showed
more than 55% of Brazilians were living in food
insecurity, up from 23% in 2013.PHOTOGRAPH BY LUISA DÖRR FOR TIME