Brazil Will Lula be back?

Anazir Maria de Oliveira has a simple message for the man they call Lula. “Comrade, I want you back,” said the 88-year-old union veteran and black activist as she celebrated the return of her “guru” to Brazil’s political fray.

Until just a few months ago, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva seemed to have reached the melancholy twilight of a mythical political career. The former factory worker rose to become one of the world’s most popular leaders before, in a dramatic fall from grace, he was jailed and barred from office.

But the quashing of corruption convictions against Brazil’s first working-class president has scrambled the South American country’s politics and given believers the tantalising hope that the septuagenarian politician could make a comeback.

Five months after Lula’s political rights were restored, polls suggest that in next year’s election he would thrash Brazil’s far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, who is facing mounting anger over his response to a Covid outbreak that has killed more than half a million Brazilians.

“Seeing him in the presidency again is everything we want … I’m heart and soul Lula,” enthused De Oliveira.

Lula, a two-term president from 2003 to 2010, has yet to formally announce what would be his sixth presidential campaign since he first sought to become Brazil’s leader in 1989. In a recent interview the 75-yearold stopped short of confirming his plans but said he had been inspired by Joe Biden’s election at 78.

John D French, the author of a new biography charting Lula’s rise from unionist to president, said he had no doubt Lula would run – and was wellplaced to win.

“He’s the Pelé of international presidential electoral politics – nobody has a record like he does anywhere in the world,” said French, remembering how either Lula or Lula’s anointed candidate had come first or second in six successive elections going back to 1998.

Lula lost that year’s contest to the centrist Fernando Henrique Cardoso but won a historic landslide four years later, telling voters “hope had overcome fear”. Members of Lula’s Workers’ party (PT) are pushing a similarly upbeat message now, as Brazil reels from a coronavirus-driven health and economic catastrophe that has killed more than 550,000 people and plunged the country into a profound funk.

“The fact is [Lula] represents a moment when things went well, when Brazil felt it was moving forwards, when things were happening, when the minimum wage was going up, when your children could go to school, when 10m houses were built,” said French. Bolsonaro, in contrast, was widely associated with today’s “suffering, crisis and desperation”.

“Everybody feels in their daily life what is going on right now,” French said. “I don’t just mean the unemployment … People are losing large numbers of members of their family. It’s very real.”

Many conservatives are horrified by the thought of Lula’s return and some on the left are wary, too, even if they concede his political dominance may mean he is best positioned to defeat Bolsonaro.

Ciro Gomes, a former Lula minister who is now his main leftwing rival, called a third Lula presidency an “awful” prospect. “What is it that Lula wants to do … that he didn’t do during the four terms he managed to win for himself or for the representative he put forward?” Gomes asked, referring to Lula’s successor, Dilma Rousseff, who won elections in 2010 and 2014.

Gomes claimed voter fury over “the economic and moral debacle” of past PT governments – when key Lula associates, including his chief of staff and finance minister, were jailed for corruption – had paved the way for Bolsonaro’s election.

There is far greater excitement among PT devotees, who have started attending anti-Bolsonaro protests in red T-shirts bearing the slogan: “Lula 2022.”

De Oliveira warned that Bolsonaro’s defeat was not assured. She believed many residents of Vila Aliança, the favela where she lives on Rio’s deprived western limits, regretted voting Bolsonaro in 2018, having lost jobs or relatives to a pandemic their president has repeatedly trivialised. One neighbour recently apologised to her for backing Bolsonaro – but other locals remained loyal.

“If Lula does run in 2022, it won’t be an easy election. Today he’s ahead – but politics is constantly changing,” she said. “I’ll tell you one thing though: things can’t stay the way they are. Poor Brazilians have been utterly abandoned by the federal government … So many people have died.”

‘Lula represents a time when things went well, when Brazil felt it was moving forwards’

John D French Biographer