Many buried him politically when he was jailed for corruption in 2018. But former Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, once a leftist icon in Latin America, hopes for a third term to “repair” the country and restore “happiness. “to Brazilians, who enjoyed years of prosperity during his two governments.
Lula da Silva, just 77 years old, was resurrected last year in politics after the annulment of the sentence by the Supreme Court and this Sunday he faces the second round of his sixth presidential electionin front of the far-right president Jair Bolsonaro.
And polls show him as the favorite, albeit by a few points.
“We must fix this country (…) so that the Brazilian people can smile again”, said in recent days the former trade unionist out of poverty, who during his campaign promised to recover the purchasing power so that people “can go back and eat a picaña (a very popular type of sliced meat in Brazil) and have a beer” on weekends.
Twice president between 2003 and 2010, Lula left power with nearly 90% popularity after a run in which 30 million of the more than 200 million Brazilians were lifted from poverty.
And he has gained enormous international prestige as a driver of the Brazilian economic “miracle”, driven by high commodity prices and a liberal management of the economy, far from the radical left image that some have tried to imprint on him.
But the scenario is not the same. If she wins, Lula will not have the same prosperity as her years at the helm of the Planalto Palace. Although the economy is showing signs of improving, with mild growth, less inflation and more employment, it is far from the prosperity of a decade ago.
The origins
A tiny mud hut, a replica of his family’s when he was born on October 27, 1945, recalls his humble origins in the poor northeast of Brazil.
The seventh child of a couple who could neither read nor write, Lula was abandoned by his father before the family moved to the industrialized metropolis of São Paulo in search of opportunities.
He was a peddler and a shoe shine. At the age of 14 he begins his training as a turner, loses a little finger while handling a machine and in the late 1970s, as leader of the metalworkers union, he led a historic strike which challenged the military dictatorship (1964-1985).
He contested the first presidential elections after democratization, in 1989, and then in 1994, 1998 and 2002. That year he finally achieved his goal and became the first Brazilian head of state of the working class.
“I would have liked to have been a doctor, but I was lucky that you gave me the first diploma of my life, that of President of the Republic,” he said in an act.
But his political career was marked by corruption scandals.
He was re-elected despite the Mensalao case, an illegal millionaire account created by the Workers’ Party (PT) – which he co-founded in 1980 – to buy the support of members of Congress.
He also ended up getting involved in the car wash, the largest anti-corruption operation in the history of the country, centered on a gigantic web of corruption around the state-owned Petrobras oil company.
In 2017 he was sentenced to nine and a half years in prison for obtaining an apartment from a construction company in exchange for public contracts, while always defending his innocence.
Was 19 months in prison and in 2021 he regained his political rights with the annulment of the sentence for procedural irregularities.
“I stayed calm, preparing myself as Mandela prepared for 27 years, as Gandhi prepared his whole life, to get out of prison without anger,” the former president said.
Politics and private life
A father of five and a cancer survivor, Lula married for the third time in March to sociologist Rosangela da Silva, “Janja”.
“I could live my life with ‘Janja’ and quit politics,” but “I have a cause, which is to straighten the rights of the Brazilian people,” he said.
Lula has monopolized the leadership of the Brazilian center-left, without opening up much space for generational change. Of nine democratic elections, including the current one, he was absent in only three.
In any case, he has announced that he will not seek re-election if he wins.
“If they elect me, I will only be president for one term,” he promised. “Nature does not forgive”.
Source: AFP
CB
Source: Clarin
