Lula’s Last Dance - The New Yorker

In the final days of his final campaign, supporters of the Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva turned to a British classic. David Bowie and Queen’s 1981 hit, “Under Pressure,” became the soundtrack of a viral video showing scenes from the eighty-year-old Lula’s half century in politics. Here was the humble trade unionist, born into extreme poverty, standing up as a fiery-eyed tribune of the workers. “Can’t we give ourselves one more chance?” the song implores, over clips of a younger, scraggly-bearded Lula rallying the people, casting his vote in the ballot box, and winning elections. “Why can’t we give love that one more chance?” we hear as the song crescendoes, amid footage of Lula mobbed by ecstatic crowds, kissing the Brazilian flag, and embracing a kaleidoscope of his countrymen, from red-shirted throngs in São Paulo to Indigenous leaders from the Amazon. Then there’s an older Lula, back on the streets after being freed from prison for what his allies always believed were unjust corruption charges, and mobilizing opposition to Brazil’s far right in defense of the country’s democracy. The song subsides: “This is our last dance.”

The music could stop this weekend, as Brazilians vote in the second round of their Presidential election. Lula faces a career-ending defeat, with the odds favoring Flavio Bolsonaro, a hard-right challenger who, like his jailed father, the former President Jair Bolsonaro, is bent on unravelling Lula’s legacy. The first round, which took place on October 4th, was grim for Lula. In a surprise result, the incumbent placed two points behind Bolsonaro, who is currently a senator, while right-wing parties and candidates surged in congressional and state elections across the country. Brazil is now poised to become the most important entry on a long list of Latin American states that have swung to the right in the past two years, a shift that runs in concert with the Trump Administration’s ideological vision for the hemisphere. (If Lula loses, only Mexico, Guatemala, and Uruguay will remain as countries with elected left-leaning governments.) Even if Lula pulls out a narrow victory, he could spend his next term significantly constrained by a federal structure dominated by the right. He’s also going up against history: the first-round winner in Brazil’s Presidential race has won the second-round vote in every election stretching back to 1989, the first direct Presidential election held in the country after it was redemocratized following years of military dictatorship.

Lula ran in that 1989 election, too, and lost in the runoff. But he went on to become the most consequential figure in Brazil’s modern democratic era, and his Workers’ Party one of the leading political forces in South America. He was finally elected to the Presidency in 2002 and served two terms, until the end of 2010, harnessing a commodity boom to invest in major social spending, including welfare programs, that lifted tens of millions out of poverty. He positioned Brazil as a world leader in climate action, helping slow the deforestation of the Amazon. And he led Brazil into the vanguard of the Global South, charting an independent line in foreign policy that placed his country as one of the new pillars of an aspirational reconfigured global order. Constitutional rules prohibiting more than two consecutive terms in office led to his being succeeded in 2011 by his close political ally Dilma Rousseff, whose tenure suffered tougher economic headwinds and was brought to an end by a sprawling corruption scandal that implicated a swath of Brazil’s political and business establishments. The investigations led to Lula himself being convicted of corruption and money laundering in 2018, and being given a twelve-year sentence; five hundred and eighty days later, he was released, after a court ruled that he had been denied adequate due process, an outcome that confirmed for many of his supporters the belief that his incarceration had been engineered to keep him out of an election cycle that he would have won. (The charges were completely annulled in 2021.)

Instead, Jair Bolsonaro, a hard-right former Army man who looked approvingly on the days of military rule, was elected. As President, he slashed Lula’s protections for the environment, cut funding to universities and to urban-housing programs, and badly mismanaged the pandemic. In 2022, Lula summoned his old populist magnetism, built a coalition large enough to defeat Bolsonaro, and won a third term. But Bolsonaro, styled in international media as the Trump of the Tropics, did not accept losing. On January 8, 2023, thousands of his supporters stormed the heart of Brasilia, the federal capital, vandalizing the buildings of the Supreme Court, Congress, and the Presidential Palace.

Brazilian authorities later determined that Bolsonaro was part of a coup plot to oust Lula; he’s currently serving a twenty-seven-year sentence under house arrest. The insurrection drew immediate and obvious parallels to the United States, which, during much of the past decade, has lurched alongside Brazil through a strange hall of mirrors. In some ways, the two largest democracies of the Western Hemisphere are experiencing a shared reality on different time lines: Jair Bolsonaro and Trump both ran as anti-establishment demagogues, peddling a divisive nationalism that tapped into widespread voter apathy and disillusionment, and won a base among devoted evangelical Christians. (They also both came with a soap-opera-worthy cast of scions and hangers-on, a number of whom appear enmeshed in a range of suspect, self-dealing enterprises.) Lula and Joe Biden, well-known veterans of an older, more liberal status quo, seemed the right sorts of politicians to thwart the reëlection of Bolsonaro and Trump, respectively, but they failed to defeat Trumpism or Bolsonarismo as movements. Like Biden, in this cycle Lula found that a disconcerting number of his compatriots were unmoved by his calls to save democracy from those who would seek to undermine it—or didn’t buy into his rhetoric in the first place.

Though no one can accuse Lula, as they did Biden, of lacking the mental and physical acuity for the job—his social media includes various videos of him working out—his politics, rooted in unions and labor movements from the nineteen-seventies and eighties, don’t register as much in a Brazil now reshaped by the more atomized gig economies of the twenty-first century. Lula can tout some strong macroeconomic indicators—unemployment is at its lowest rate since 2012—but most Brazilians feel the crunch of a cost-of-living crisis, persistent concerns about law and order, and a growing pessimism about the direction of their country. Those dynamics hobbled the Democrats in 2024; meanwhile, anger over inflation in the U.S. has only intensified in the past two years under Trump.

There are more than echoes ricocheting between the United States and Brazil. Trump has slapped tariffs on the Brazilian economy and punitive sanctions on Alexandre de Moraes, the chief justice most heavily involved in the prosecution of Jair Bolsonaro. (The sanctions were dropped, though the White House has recently weighed reimposing them.) Lula seized on these acts as meddling in the campaign, and as an assault on Brazilian sovereignty encouraged by the Bolsonaro family. But such is the scale of Brazil’s polarization that many Brazilians are insensible to Lula’s entreaties and want the left defeated. If elected, the younger Bolsonaro, who comports himself as a more moderate version of his father, has been clear on his plans not only to secure his father’s freedom but to punish the top figures in the judiciary who pushed for his prosecution. His brother, Eduardo, who has spent Lula’s term in self-imposed exile in the United States, wants to purge the country’s foreign ministry. A year ago, Brazil’s decision to investigate and punish Bolsonaro, Sr., was hailed by many observers as a courageous example of how to deal with assaults on the peaceful transfer of power. But a return of the Bolsonaros, Oliver Stuenkel, a German Brazilian political scientist and writer, told me, “would force us to reassess that conviction among democracy scholars around the world that Brazil led the way in showing how to protect democracy against authoritarianism.”

On Sunday, the two candidates took part in an acrimonious, largely unedifying televised debate, where they paced around each other onstage and hurled insults. Bolsonaro cast Lula as a thief, suggesting that it was best to keep his physical distance, “because my wallet could be stolen.” Lula called Bolsonaro a “thug,” an apparent allusion to alleged ties to a host of paramilitary organizations in Rio de Janeiro. (Bolsonaro has previously denied any such connections and dismissed the allegations as “smears.”) In the vein of El Salvador’s President, Nayib Bukele, Bolsonaro has promised a ruthless crackdown on crime, with expanded maximum-security prisons to detain more suspected cartel members and chemical castration for convicted rapists. Some in Bolsonaro’s camp want him to follow the lead of the Argentinian President, Javier Milei, a radical libertarian who has hacked away at public spending and shut down whole government ministries. But most Brazilians don’t have much of an appetite for such shock therapy. “If I were a Flavio supporter or an adviser, I would be worried about overinterpreting my mandate and going too far,” Andre Pagliarini, a historian of Brazil at Louisiana State University, told me. “The election may be a repudiation of Lula, but it’s not a sign of deep support for the kind of reactionary overreach that Flavio is promising.”

In the event of Lula’s defeat, Brazil may cut a very different pose on the world stage. Lula is a champion of the Palestinian cause; Bolsonaro, like his father, has made a point of befriending the Israeli right. He may also seek to weaken Brazil’s commitments to the U.N.’s climate treaty and to non-Western blocs such as the BRICS. A senior Brazilian diplomat, speaking to me on condition of anonymity, suggested that a Flavio victory would see “Brazil having to resign from being one of the protagonists of the Global South to becoming a pawn on Trump’s chessboard.” That may be an exaggeration, given Brazil’s clout and heft, and also its extensive ties with China, its biggest trade partner. Brazil’s lucrative agrobusinesses, whose owners mostly back Bolsonaro, need the Chinese market and often compete with U.S. exporters. “You’ve seen versions of this all over Latin America, with leaders on the new right who have very quickly pivoted to a more neutral or nonaligned posture when it comes to the China-versus-U.S. competition,” Brian Winter, editor-in-chief of Americas Quarterly, told me. “But it’s especially true of Brazil.” After next month’s midterms, Trump’s brand could be weaker than it has ever been, and his signature policy for the region—an anti-cartel security pact called the Shield of the Americas which he unveiled this March, in Florida—could be short-lived. “It’s mostly an anti-incumbent wave that we’re seeing,” Chris Sabatini, the director for Latin America at Chatham House, told me. “And so, what this will mean is a lot of these initiatives that Trump has started, like the Shield of the Americas, will not live past the Trump government.”

Lula is hoping that millions of disaffected Brazilians who didn’t vote in the first round may yet come out to cast a ballot for him. He has had time to take stock of the global scene and has contemplated his place within it. In an interview with The New Yorker’s Jon Lee Anderson last year, he described his uneasiness watching Trump, who looms over the hemispheric right. As Lula put it, “I saw a speech of his in the U.S. Congress recently, and it was absurd—those Republicans clapping at whatever nonsense he said. “It was almost the same kind of speech that anarchists used to make in Italy and Brazil at the beginning of the century, calling for a society without institutions, a society where the empire of capital rules.” He lamented the waning of the international order, which the United States helped author after the Second World War. “We thought we were creating a more civilized, more solidarity-based, more humane society,” he said.♦

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