Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva

lula is everywhere right now — in the polling data, in the trade summits, in the fractures opening up on the Brazilian right. and that simultaneous presence across so many registers is exactly what makes him worth a closer look.

he started, genuinely, at the bottom. born in the drought-stricken northeast of Brazil in 1945, he left school after second grade. he learned to read at ten. by his teens he was working metal on factory floors in São Paulo, and that world — the noise of it, the labor of it, the specific indignity of being ignored by people in suits — shaped everything that came after. he helped lead the ABC strikes in the late 1970s, when standing up to factory owners also meant standing up to a military dictatorship. he co-founded the Workers' Party in 1980. he ran for president and lost. ran again and lost. ran a third time and lost. then, in 2002, he won. left office in 2011 with an 80 percent approval rating and millions of Brazilians lifted out of poverty through programs like Bolsa Família. then came the corruption convictions, 580 days in prison, convictions that the Supreme Court later nullified after finding serious bias in how they were conducted. he ran again in 2022, beat Jair Bolsonaro in a runoff, and was sworn in at 77 as the oldest president in Brazilian history.

so that's the arc. what makes the current moment interesting is that the next chapter is already beginning to write itself.

on the regional and international front, lula has been doing what he does — positioning Brazil as a hub rather than a tributary. Mercosur, the South American trade bloc, is now in preliminary talks with Japan, months after lula's administration helped navigate the long-stalled Mercosur–EU trade agreement toward a preliminary approval. these aren't small moves. they reflect a deliberate bet that Brazil's leverage comes from being indispensable to multiple partners at once — Europe, Asia, its own neighborhood. he's also personally pushing to accelerate gas talks between Petrobras and Bolivia's state energy company, which is the kind of bilateral detail that signals an engaged executive rather than a ceremonial one.

at home, the picture is more complicated and more politically useful to him. the Bolsonaro family is visibly fracturing. a rift has opened around the question of women voters — a demographic the Brazilian right has struggled to hold — and it's playing out in public, which is rarely a good sign for any political coalition heading into a campaign. against this backdrop, a reuters poll now shows lula leading in a potential runoff against Eduardo Bolsonaro, Jair's son, who has emerged as a likely opposition candidate. lula leads. not by a landslide, but steadily, which at this stage of a race is almost more meaningful than a blowout.

what stays with you, when you sit with lula's story, is how much of it is about duration. he has been politically relevant for nearly half a century — through dictatorship, through prison, through exile from power, through reinvention. most politicians have one act. he's on his third, and it might be the most consequential.