The Life and Times of Lula da Silva

Andre Pagliarini considers the recent biography “Lula” by Fernando Morais, translated by Brian Mier.

By Andre PagliariniFebruary 1, 2025

• Biography & Autobiography

• Politics

ON NOVEMBER 18–19, 2024, leaders descended upon the sensuous metropolis of Rio de Janeiro for the G20 summit, the annual gathering of the world’s largest economies. The meeting marked the culmination of Brazil’s year as G20 head, a rotating position that allows different countries to set priorities for joint action. Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva—known universally as Lula—emphasized the fight against global hunger, inequality, and climate change and proposed a broader reconfiguration of multilateral institutions of global governance. The summit displayed Lula in his element, patting shoulders, holding hands, hugging, and backslapping as he played host to the most powerful politicians on earth. How many democratic presidents today could exchange warm embraces with the US president, the Russian foreign minister, and the general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party in rapid succession?

Over this showcase of Lula’s diplomacy hung a dark shadow of radical domestic opposition. Days before the summit, on November 13, a far-right extremist blew himself up near Brazil’s Supreme Federal Court in the capital of Brasília after failing to gain entry into the building. Less than a week later, police arrested several high-ranking members of the Brazilian armed forces for allegedly plotting to assassinate Lula and other authorities following the 2022 presidential election. This dramatic development was part of a broader investigation into the planning of a coup that directly implicates former president Jair Bolsonaro, who was already barred from office until 2030 for efforts to undermine Brazilian democracy. This legal remedy, while notably nonprescribable in the United States, is one that Brazilian jurists can apply in response to rogue figures like Bolsonaro.

Six years ago, Lula, who served successfully as chief executive from 2003 to 2011, was himself disqualified from running for president by the same token. Brazil’s Constitution allows presidents to serve two consecutive four-year terms and then to run again later. Polls showed Lula was set to return to office, but in April 2018 he was arrested on charges of corruption and money laundering and barred from running by a statute he had signed into law himself in 2010. Subsequent events have borne out what many in Lula’s Workers’ Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores, or PT) and the Brazilian Left more generally were saying at the time—namely, that the prosecution against him was motivated by political animus and sustained by flimsy evidence. By late 2019, he was released from prison and more determined than ever to mount a political comeback. At stake was his place in history.

Against that backdrop, Lula’s 2022 electoral victory over Bolsonaro marked an extraordinary turnaround for Lula personally and for Brazil generally. Among other things, it was the first time a challenger unseated an incumbent president, a testament to Lula’s remarkable political standing. It also spoke to enduring popular support for the social democratic ideal he represents in contrast to the aggressiveness of the Bolsonaro movement. No other leader has stood more effectively against the reactionary tide that engulfed the country in the last decade. Indeed, Lula’s central role in Brazil’s recent history and his triumph over successive obstacles are reminders of his exceptionality.

In the new biography Lula (originally published in Brazil in 2021), recently translated by Brian Mier, author Fernando Morais uses the travails that have marked Lula’s life to frame an episodic account of the 79-year-old president’s political trajectory. Envisioned as the first of a two-part biographical epic—and very much reading that way—Morais’s narrative jumps cinematically and nonchronologically across Lula’s life and career, beginning in the immediate run-up to his arrest in 2018 and concluding with his election to the National Congress in 1986, a seminal year in the drawn-out transition to civilian rule after more than two decades of military dictatorship. In his first successful foray into electoral politics, Lula garnered more votes than anyone running for legislative office in Brazil ever had.

Historian Paulo Santos Silva rightly characterized the Morais book as an “immediate” biography, one that blends current reportage on a relevant living subject with historical narrative. This approach is unsurprising coming from Morais, a seasoned journalist and current chair of Inter Press Service, a global news agency that provides independent, international news coverage with a focus on social justice, human rights, and development in the Global South. He has been close to Lula and other members of the PT for years. He has also written celebrated works on various aspects of Brazil’s 20th-century political history, including biographies of the communist militant Olga Benário and the media tycoon Assis Chateaubriand, both of which were made into films. In 2019, Netflix adapted another of his works, 2011’s The Last Soldiers of the Cold War, under the title Wasp Network. He also authored a prizewinning account of Shindo Renmei, a terrorist organization that killed almost two dozen Japanese Brazilians after World War II. In short, he is sharply attuned to the human dramas of deep political commitments.

The strength of Morais’s Lula biography is its vivid rendering of Brazil’s tense political moment, the origins of which emerged amid massive demonstrations that rocked the country in 2013. As Brazil prepared to host the 2014 FIFA World Cup and the 2016 Olympics, small urban protests against rising bus fares quickly morphed into widespread unrest nationwide, fueled by frustration over government corruption and inadequate public services. While the movement highlighted legitimate grievances, its lack of clear demands and harsh anti-incumbent sentiment ultimately paved the way for the rise of a new far-right coalition that would bring Bolsonaro’s crass authoritarianism to the center of Brazilian life. As journalist Vincent Bevins wrote in 2018 as Brazilians headed to the polls, it “occurred to many that an imperfect, even slightly corrupt, popular democratic government is better than blowing up the system altogether. This may explain why polls indicate that Lula would likely win this October—if he weren’t in jail.”

Morais’s biography begins in those delicate months before the 2018 election. The reader meets Lula holed up at the headquarters of the Sindicato dos Metalúrgicos do ABC, the union representing metalworkers in the industrial belt around the city of São Paulo. It is this same union that first launched the future president onto the national stage in the late 1970s. In the first pages, Lula is deciding how to respond to an imminent warrant for his arrest. We are in the room with him as allies come and go, a palpable uncertainty of what’s to come hanging in the air. He should flee! He should surrender! As nervous conversations unspool, we can practically hear the throngs of supporters hastily gathered outside the building to show their support and voice their outrage at the former president’s dire legal predicament.

“The best solution for everyone would be for him to turn himself in. We don’t want to have to conduct a difficult operation,” the Federal Police chief warns members of Lula’s inner circle tasked with negotiating on his behalf. “He is the ex-president of Brazil,” reply two prominent members of the PT. “We won’t let him be humiliated.”

The urgent, in medias res picture Morais paints gets at one of the book’s potential issues, namely that it expects readers to already be up to speed with the major fault lines of Brazilian politics. The narrative is so propulsive that Morais spends little time explaining, which is not necessarily a bad thing if one is familiar with the key players and dynamics in question. On the other hand, curious readers who pick up the book to learn about a leader they’ve heard of in passing on the news might struggle to parse the stakes of this or that interaction.

The first six chapters of the book address Lula’s eventual imprisonment and its dramatic aftermath. Knocked out of the presidential race in 2018, Lula and his party cast about for a standard-bearer from within their ranks. They settled on former minister of education and São Paulo mayor Fernando Haddad, whose low-key, professorial style stood in marked contrast to Lula’s punchy and emotional working-class populism. Morais excels at illuminating these fateful political turns, elucidating the internal debates and palace (or prison) intrigue that many of us who followed these events closely could at the time only guess at.

Upon leaving office in 2011, Lula’s approval rating was almost 90 percent. He handed power to his former chief of staff Dilma Rousseff, a successor he had personally selected from a variety of plausible and even more prominent PT candidates. But Lula’s party, which mastered traditional means of political communication by the early 2000s, was slow to respond to the rise of social media in the 2010s.

The stern yet ethical Rousseff, Brazil’s first female president, was initially quite popular. After narrowly winning reelection amid economic crisis in 2014, however, her party faced a reactionary groundswell that culminated in her extremely contentious impeachment in 2016. Backlash to more than a decade of continuous PT governance defined national politics for the next few years. This shifting political terrain favored histrionics, something Haddad was unsuited to deliver. In the wake of Rousseff’s impeachment, he had lost his bid for reelection as mayor of São Paulo to a millionaire who once hosted the Brazilian version of The Apprentice. Meeting that moment of right-wing ascension and the proliferation of social media disinformation was Bolsonaro, a longtime backbencher in Congress whose only distinguishing feature was his unapologetic celebration of the military dictatorship that ruled Brazil between 1964 and 1985. Before embarking on a long political career, Bolsonaro had graduated from the Military Academy of Agulhas Negras in 1977, the year before Lula was elected to a second term as head of what was then known as the Metalworkers Union of São Bernardo do Campo and Diadema.

It is in that earlier phase of Lula’s life, a period of personal growth and political maturation, that Morais spends the rest of the book. It is 1980, and the reader encounters a groggy Lula awakening to authorities at the door. He is about to be arrested for the first time:

He stood up. Barefoot and shirtless, Lula walked out onto the street buttoning his fly. Showing no fear, but in a very bad mood, he struck up a tense conversation with the supposed boss of the group.

“What is it? What do you want?”

“You are under arrest.”

“Under arrest for what?”

“We don’t know either. They just told us to arrest you.”

“Okay,” Lula said. “Hold on a minute, because I want to brush my teeth, get dressed, and have a cup of coffee.”

A few chapters later, Morais time-jumps again, discussing Lula’s hardscrabble childhood and his mother’s tenacity as she fights to give her children a better life. Again, the chronological leaps might be confusing to those with only a passing familiarity with Lula and the sociopolitical landscape of 20th-century Brazil. The overall effect, however, depicts the president as a man frequently backed into a corner. Brazil has no equivalent to the vaunted American dream, which holds out a baseline assumption, however ethereal, of upward mobility. It was not a given that Lula would be anything in life other than a blue-collar worker. What has set him apart, in Morais’s rendering, is a disarmingly gruff leadership style that punctures pretension and fosters lasting bonds of trust and friendship.

That approach also masks Lula’s inherent political moderation. In a society riven by deep structural inequalities, a social democratic union leader can sound to many like a radical firebrand. But in another landmark Lula biography published in 2020, historian John D. French argues that the president has always been an institutionalist, whether in favor of his union or his political party. “He never sought an unmediated relationship between atomized individuals and an anointed savior,” an element usually deemed “central to ‘charismatic’ or ‘populist’ leadership.” Morais complements, deepens, and ultimately enriches this characterization by focusing intently on Lula’s relationships with other workers, members of the clergy, politicians, and activists over the course of decades.

Morais certainly has what political scientist Luiz Marques called the “charisma of prose” in his review of Lula: Biografia Volume 1, referring to the author’s aptitude for “describing facts while stirring hearts.” Yet, there are moments where the text would benefit from zooming out, from Morais explicating more directly how a given political interaction should be understood in the broader context of Brazil’s political culture. This biography was written by a Brazilian for Brazilians, which is hardly a demerit for the bold foreign reader who wants to dive into the highly publicized, high-stakes maelstrom of the fourth-largest democracy on earth. It does, however, demand considerable background knowledge from readers.

Lula’s foreign policy today is often discussed in the context of the BRICS bloc, the loose confederation of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa identified at the dawn of the 21st century as key developing economies whose emergence points to a global order beyond US hegemony. This approach to international affairs has roots in the Cold War, a period that shaped Lula’s political outlook. By the late 1970s, the Brazilian military had maintained a violent grip on power for almost a decade and a half, with anticommunism its clarion call. Facing rapid economic decline and shifting geopolitics, however, the regime found itself reeling precisely as Lula emerged on the national stage. In a strategy partly intended to divide the opposition, the generals allowed for the formation of new political parties beginning in 1980. With Lula as its face, the rowdy, emboldened labor movement simmering on the outskirts of the city of São Paulo joined the partisan fray. “The union activists toyed around with several different names for the new party,” Morais writes. Lula’s first arrest in 1980 reflected his growing notoriety in the eyes of the authorities—and came just two months after the founding of the Workers’ Party.

The PT was hardly the creation of Lula alone, as Morais makes clear, but there has never been any doubt about the centrality of the union leader to the fortunes of the first genuinely working-class political party in Brazilian history. The birth of the PT on February 10, 1980, is the crowning moment of the Morais biography. What followed were arduous years of partisan construction that saw multiple setbacks and crushing defeats, including Lula’s distant third-place finish in the 1982 São Paulo governor’s race. And though the tome is not formally billed as “part one,” it leaves off in 1986 amid a pivotal upswing for the PT. As the armed forces handed power back to civilians in 1985, the nation entered a new era of civic construction, one in which Lula as congressman, party leader, and eventually president would figure prominently.

In the epilogue, Morais addresses his plans to continue writing the story of Lula’s life. Part two, he writes, “will recount what happened behind the scenes in Lula’s three electoral losses [for president], the successes and the setbacks of his two presidential terms, and everything that I saw and heard during Dilma Rousseff’s two terms in office and the crisis into which Brazil sunk in 2013.” The picture as of now is incomplete, but when finished, Morais’s saga will rank among the most important examinations of one of the world’s great democratic statesmen.