Lula: A Biography
Fernando Morais
Verso, $34.95 (cloth)
Fernando Morais’s Lula, a new biography of Brazil’s current third-term president, describes the tension on the morning of April 7, 2018. The night before, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva—known simply as “Lula”—had been charged with corruption and given a day to turn himself in. He’d headed to São Paulo’s Metalworkers Union headquarters to discuss his next moves with a few close associates. “As the sun came up, fourteen of the twenty-four hours given by Judge Moro had come and gone,” Morais writes. “They can come and get me here,” Lula announces.
By that morning, the union hall has filled with union comrades, Lula’s Workers’ Party (PT) members, clergy, and activists from Lula’s past, setting the stage for a dramatic standoff between Lula and his supporters—and by extension, ordinary Brazilians—and the powerful defenders of privilege who controlled the judiciary. Brazil’s media giant, Globo, had falsely reported that Lula intended to resist arrest, and emotions were running high. At one point, there are fears that power to the union hall would be cut, and Lula’s supporters discover hidden listening devices and cameras planted by police agents. Less than a kilometer away, riot police are ready to raid the building. Morais captures Lula’s back-and-forth with his closest allies, some of whom urge him to flee.
The wide-ranging—and at times, politically motivated—Operation Car Wash investigation that year had implicated hundreds, including Lula and several Workers’ Party officials, in systematic corruption and bribery involving Brazil’s largest construction firms and Petrobrás, its national oil company. Lula has maintained his innocence the whole time, but declares he will surrender to the authorities. “I would resist if I could,” Lula tells São Paulo organizer Guilherme Boulos, “but I am convinced this is the best decision.”
Lula turns himself in, but not before a mass is held in the union hall in honor of Marisa Letícia, his late wife, and Lula delivers a fifty-minute speech. “I dreamed that it would be possible to govern this country by bringing millions and millions of poor people into the economy, into the universities, and creating millions of jobs in this country,” he says, his audience imploring him not to surrender. “They ordered my arrest, but they’ll learn that the death of a fighter doesn’t halt a revolution.” Lula then steps into a car, but the crowd won’t let it leave.
He makes his way to another waiting car, which takes him to a police station to be processed. From there, he’s flown to Curitiba, where he will spend the next nineteen months in prison before being released on evidence of prosecutorial misconduct, well before the end of his nine-year sentence. Text messages exposed by a hacker had revealed collusion and manipulation in the case against Lula; eventually, he is found innocent altogether. Upon his release, he credits his supporters. “Every single day, you were the fuel of democracy that I needed,” he tells them. “These people have to know one thing: they didn’t imprison a man. They tried to kill an idea, and you can’t kill an idea. An idea doesn’t disappear.”
Lula’s arrest and vindication made for a spectacular drama. But it was just one of many challenges he’d had to overcome—the Car Wash incident wasn’t even the first time he had been jailed by political opponents. It’s hard to imagine a more extraordinary political triumph. Lula was born in abject poverty, raised mostly by a single mother, and sent to work at age eight; by adulthood, he had founded a political party. He ran for president three times before winning the fourth time in 2002 and getting reelected in 2006. After his 2022 release from prison, he won his third presidential term with the most votes—some 60.3 million—in Brazilian history.
It is impossible to reflect on Lula’s life and influence without resorting to superlatives about his achievements. Barack Obama once called him “the most popular politician on Earth.” At least one journalist has speculated that if you tally all the votes Lula has received across his campaigns, he might be the most voted-for human being on the planet. It seems impossible to defeat him: neither the corporate media, nor trumped-up charges and imprisonment, nor fake news and right-wing mobilization, nor even cancer and personal tragedy has put a stop to him. His very name has become a political science concept—“Lulismo”—that describes both the doctrine of conciliatory leftism he developed and a historical epoch of economic growth and unparalleled social inclusion in Brazil. Morais’s book is the first to offer a detailed look at Lula’s early years, from his childhood to the run-up to his first congressional election win in 1986: a period crucial to understanding the politician he was destined to become.
Lula’s political story begins almost four decades before his 2018 arrest, when, in 1980, he is jailed by the military dictatorship. A former metalworker, Lula had emerged as an important, and increasingly targeted, labor leader during a wave of strikes that were galvanizing the nation as they grew. As Morais writes, Lula’s response to his arrest already reflects his characteristic humor and fearlessness. When the police arrive at his house, Lula—still in bed—famously tells them, “They can go fuck themselves. I’m sleeping, damn it!” He needs to brush his teeth and have coffee before being taken in, he jokes.
The scene is gripping: Lula sits in the back of an unmarked van, flanked by six armed men, wondering if they will run him over to make his death seem like an accident—a realistic concern, given the number of activists murdered by the dictatorship in those years. Still, he musters courage. About a month later, after being held and interrogated, he is let go. If the dictatorship’s goal in arresting him had been to silence him, they had badly miscalculated the power of his charisma. The arrest made Lula a cause célèbre, propelling him to national and international prominence as a symbol of the resistance and a working-class hero.
The political party Lula had helped found in February of that year, the PT, would also grow in size and influence, due in no small part to his exploding fame. Why a political outsider would choose to invest in forming a political party takes some explaining, and Morais details the evolution of both the party and Lula himself during those early years. Lula had been famous for saying that “he [didn’t] like politics and [didn’t] like people who practice politics,” but as the one-party dictatorship started to loosen its grip on political life in the late 1970s, allowing for an official opposition party, the Brazilian Democratic Movement, it was becoming clear to Lula and others that workers would have little say or space within it. The actual idea of a Workers’ Party, according to Lula, came to him on July 15, 1978, at a petroleum workers’ strike in the northeastern state of Bahia.
From the outset, he was insistent that it be an authentic party of, and by, workers. “The place for students is in the schools. For priests, it’s in the churches. If someone wants to create a party for workers, he has to wear overalls,” he declares. Intellectuals, who would come to play a central role in the PT’s future, would only come later. Mario Pedrosa, the art critic, was the first of them to join. “The party will need people like us, at least as sympathizers,” he tells a skeptical fellow intellectual.
What an authentic party of workers would mean in practice was far from self-evident. The older Brazilian cadre left, represented by the Communist Party, as well as the armed insurrectionist movements of the 1960s, had either been obliterated or run out of the country by the military dictatorship. The socialist labor left, which some hoped would be reborn, was in disarray. The late 1970s were a heady time for a Brazilian left seeking to reinvent their political project. Though the Eastern Bloc had not yet fallen, Eastern European socialist parties were already seen as hopelessly ossified, mere apologists for statist repression.
So the PT looked inward, finding influence in liberation theology, a homegrown current of Catholicism in which salvation meant freedom from political and economic oppression, and Freirean popular education, which made critical thinking and freedom the primary goal of schooling. Social movements—urban, student, feminist, environmental—were important parts of this reinvention, too. Though the PT was founded as a mass party of workers committed to bottom-up democracy and socialism, the question of whose concerns, exactly, should be at that party’s center was never foreclosed. It’s unfortunate that Morais spends relatively little time on this crucial political history, choosing to focus more on capturing the larger-than-life personalities of those who attended the party meetings.
By the time the PT was officially announced at the auditorium of the Sion High School in São Paulo on February 10, 1980, it had been decided it would be an internally plural party, eschewing a strict party line. “Allowing the participation of groups with their own political ideologies and agendas and with formal representation in the directorate,” Morais writes, was an innovation that was “inconceivable up to then in Brazilian and even in foreign leftist parties.” The PT emerged as an often heterogeneous formation, held together by a delicate compromise, with Lula himself playing an outsized role in keeping it together.
As Brazil began its transition to democracy in the early 1980s, the Workers’ Party continued to grow across the country and consolidate its strength, particularly in São Paulo. For Lula, though, the path was less clear. His first electoral attempt, running for governor of São Paulo state in 1982, was a failure, leaving him disillusioned with politics. “It hurt. It hurt a lot. I became desperate. I lost my way. I was only sure of one thing: I was done with politics,” Lula admits. In 1985, a pivotal conversation between Lula and Fidel Castro during a visit to Cuba convinced him to return to politics. As Lula reports to Morais, Castro saw an enormous victory in the election results, even though Lula had lost, and delivered an impassioned speech begging for him not to give up the fight:
Listen, Lula: never since humanity invented the vote and invented elections, no worker . . . I repeat, no worker, no member of the working class, in any place in the world . . . has ever gotten a million votes like you did. You don’t have the right to abandon politics. You don’t have the right to do this to the working class.”
The next year, Lula made a congressional run, winning the election with the highest number of votes ever recorded for that office, securing a seat for the PT in São Paulo state and setting the stage for his subsequent presidential campaigns. Lula’s first election to the presidency in 2002 was a decided first in Brazilian history. Before then, Brazilian presidents had come from elite circles, and, even what they ran on platforms of economic inclusion—like the two presidents elected before Lula—they often bitterly disappointed the poor. In 1992, Fernando Collor left the office in disgrace in a corruption scandal; Collor’s successor, Brazilian Social Democracy Party founder and sociologist (and one-time participant in early PT discussions) Fernando Henrique Cardoso managed to reduce the country’s inflation, but delivered only small social programs along with increased privatizations.
Lula’s victory marked the culmination of over two decades of electoral organizing by the left. In his first two terms, he achieved the seemingly impossible: lifting tens of millions out of poverty through Bolsa Familia, an income redistribution program, and an increased minimum wage. His administration nearly doubled university enrollment, and introduced aggressive affirmative action quotas for Black, Indigenous, and students from public schools at all the elite federal universities. In Black-majority, racially segregated Brazil, to talk about race at all—let alone recognize racial inequality—has always been a taboo subject, but quotas have steadily transformed the middle class in the country, and, despite some opposition, are unlikely to go away anytime soon. And he achieved all this while maintaining steady economic growth, low inflation, and reducing public debt.
Some of the accomplishments of those eight years reflected social movement demands and organizing. The Black Movement, for example, which had long fought for recognition of its claims, found a receptive audience for the first time in Brazil under Lula. The Lula administration also sponsored dozens of councils and conferences on topics like gender equality, racism, homelessness, and the needs of the youth. But ultimately, his ability to govern and deliver results was only possible because of his ability to make compromises. While Lula himself came in with a popular mandate, he did not come in with a red wave in Congress. He had to make deals in order to govern—and this meant bringing in more conservative forces and regional political machines into his coalition and government posts.
It was not a strategy without costs. Over Lula’s eight years, it sometimes resulted in disappointing policies for the party’s progressive base: his administration never delivered on the levels of land reform it promised nor adopted consistently pro-union positions, and it failed to confront the country’s powerful economic interests—agribusiness, construction, and the media conglomerates—head-on. Lula also had to manage tensions within the PT, with some groups expecting a more consistently leftist orientation from the presidency. And while he was mostly successful at keeping the party intact, he was unable to prevent some prominent defections and the formation of splinter parties like the Socialism and Liberty Party (PSOL), now a major PT rival.
In 2005, a wide-ranging corruption scandal erupted: a number of members of Congress were caught receiving bribes to vote with the PT. Lula acted quickly to support the investigations and dismiss anyone involved, but it forever damaged the party’s reputation as a party of ethical outsiders. While a number of officials from the PT’s leadership were found guilty, Lula himself was untouched by the allegations and managed re-election for a second term. When he left office in 2010, after his two consecutive term limit was up, he was able to name a successor—Dilma Rousseff, his former chief of staff—and left with an approval rating of 87 percent, the highest ever recorded in the country.
Rousseff did not fare as well. Though managing re-election after a rocky first term, she faced a spiraling political crisis in which centrist coalition parties abandoned the PT. Never as able a politician as Lula, and saddled with the odious task of restricting social spending in order to manage the domestic effects of the global decline in commodity prices, Rousseff was impeached in 2015 and removed from office months later. Formally launched over a budget technicality, the impeachment was in reality a calculated attack, led by an angry and increasingly mobilized upper middle class seeking to take advantage of her lack of popularity. With Rousseff and the PT out of the way, the doors had been opened for a far-right wave: one that, in 2018, elevated Jair Bolsonaro to the presidency and a bevy of ultraconservatives to congress, inaugurating one of the darkest chapters in recent Brazilian history. During the Bolsonaro years, the government waged war on universities, science, feminists, progressive textbooks and teachers, all forms of political correctness, and on the Amazon itself, accelerating deforestation to irreversible levels. And more than that, the Bolsonaro era energized violent authoritarian voices: for the first time since the end of the military dictatorship, political violence increased across Brazil.
By the time Lula assumed office again in January 2023, he had survived cancer, the death of his wife, and nearly two years in prison. His victory ended the far-right Bolsonaro regime and marked a remarkable comeback for the seventy-seven-year-old. But these events, like Lula’s first two terms in office, are not in a book that focuses primarily on his life up to 1986.
Morais’s book joins John French’s excellent and incisive, if more academic, English-language biography of Lula, Lula and His Politics of Cunning. It also obliquely engages with the work of André Singer, the prominent São Paulo Petista (PT supporter) and political scientist who coined the term “Lulismo” in 2009 to describe Lula’s distinctive style of political compromise. Morais’s book stands out for its access to its subject and the intimacy of its prose. The extensive research—hours of interviews with Lula and many others and firsthand reporting from recent events—is a monumental achievement, making Lula an important historical document. That its meticulous detail also makes for a compelling read is a testament to Morais’s craft and Brian Mier’s lively translation.
Some of the most moving chapters are the personal ones: Lula’s accounts of learning to be a metalworker at technical school, being interrogated by “a polite man in a tie,” the loss of his first wife at age twenty. The book doesn’t pretend to be neutral—Morais openly admits his friendship with Lula in the epilogue—but in some ways, this is to its benefit, preventing an admiring tone from turning hagiographic. And Lula isn’t aimed at the man’s detractors, anyway.
In Becoming Freud, Adam Phillips contrasts two modes of biography writing: one, the “fanciful (i.e. wishful), novelettish setting of scenes, and thumbnail sketches of characters, with their suppositions about what people were thinking and feeling and doing,” and the other, which delves into “the recurring preoccupations that make a life,” the internal conflicts and intimate motivations. Morais excels at the first, pulling the reader into one gripping set piece after another, but this comes at the expense of the latter. We don’t get a deep sense of Lula’s internal life, nor the “measure of incoherence” that Phillips looks for. There is little exploration of how Lula does what he does, why he does it, or whether he wrestles with reconciling ideals with the decisions he faces as a party leader or president. Instead, Lula comes across as a sympathetic champion for Brazil’s poor and working class, a man with a penchant for a good phrase, lot of charm, plenty of good friends who stand by him, and a nearly inexhaustible supply of resilience and courage.
And that is a fascinating story to tell. But Brazil’s troubled recent history casts a shadow over the book, one that never quite comes into view. Lula’s enemies—crooked judges, police interrogators, and the corporate media—don’t seem to have very complex motivations either, other than to take Lula down. The deep hatred of Lula and the left that later drove the middle and upper classes to the streets in 2013 remains a bit of a puzzle. That year, Rousseff faced protests against rises in the costs of public transportation, which morphed very quickly—and unexpectedly—into anti-government, anti-left protests. This destabilized her administration, unchaining a series of events that would lead to a legislative coup and the country’s rightward turn toward Bolsonarismo a few years later. But as analysts like André Singer and others remind us, Lula’s administrations were quite conciliatory to capital and powerful interests. Brazil’s elites did very well under him. Why would they turn on him and his project so viscerally?
Morais never tends to read Lula’s early critics clearly enough to help us understand the answer to that question. But his biographical portrait foregrounds something that our analyses on the left, like Singer’s, tend to underplay: the politics of recognition and dignity that Lula signifies. My own writing has tended to focus on the dynamics of the Workers’ Party itself, with little attention to how Lula, the person, is seen and understood by Brazilians. Yet this is probably the biggest clue in explaining the backlash he’s set off. The fact that a person like Lula—who was born poor, worked a blue-collar job, and had little in the way of formal education—could be president in such a deeply inegalitarian place like Brazil was a shock to its establishment. Lula gave ordinary people, who see themselves in Lula, permission to be and to want without apology. That enraged the country’s elites, and it might be the most threatening thing about him.
The biography has an excellent appendix that documents the media war on Lula throughout his term in office, but it doesn’t illustrate to English-language readers what many Brazilians take for granted: the open and deep class prejudice that the country’s establishment and its upper and middle classes draw on when talking about Lula. He doesn’t make verbal gaffes; he talks like an illiterate. It is not only that he drinks too much, but that he drinks cachaça, the drink of the poor. He is not corrupt; he is a common thief (ladrão) surrounded by grifters (malandros). Even the descriptions of Lula’s relatively modest apartment—the supposed evidence of bribery—were tinged with outrage about the how expensive the appliances were (the implication being that someone like Lula wouldn’t know the difference). When good wine is served at his wedding, it is news. Brazil’s colonized elites, who go shopping in Miami and SoHo (or dream of doing so), have always been deeply embarrassed of having a president who reminds them of their gardener.
The book itself also has little to say about racial prejudice and racism, which in Brazil are never far from questions of class. Lula has been, without a doubt, “Brazil’s Blackest President,” in the words of José Vicente, the Dean of Zumbi dos Palmares University, Brazil’s first Black-serving university. It was Lula who established, for the first time, serious commercial and political ties with countries in Africa; Lula who became the first president to offer an apology for Brazil’s 365 years of slavery; Lula who was the first to ever appoint Black ministers and ambassadors and whose administration created the Ministry of Racial Equality; Lula who introduced affirmative action to universities and civil service; Lula who signed the Statute of Racial Equality in 2010.
While Lula is a white man, his whiteness comes with an asterisk; he is also a migrant from the country’s poorer Northeast: a Nordestino. Nordestinos, who, like Lula, migrated southward in the millions to flee poverty starting in the 1950s, are racialized in the country’s richer South and Southeast. As Brazilian journalist and professor Fabiana Moraes reminds us, the elite’s rejection of Lula is deeply informed by this prejudice. In 2018 he and his followers were described in major newspapers’ editorials as emerging from caves in the Northeast. It was impossible not to notice the uniform pallor of Brazil’s angry upper and middle classes who took to the streets in 2013, and who have since become a loyal voting bloc for the right. The electoral maps with the results from the last presidential election tell a clear story: the whiter and wealthier and more Southern the city or state, the higher the Bolsonaro vote.
Morais’s next volume, which will focus on Lula’s presidential terms, might be where the elements left unexplored in the first will come into clearer focus—where the contradictions of being, and becoming, Lula will be on sharpest display. And these are important lessons to reflect on. It is impossible to read this biography without concluding, at the end, that the world needs more Lulas. As one country after another falls to the seductions of right-wing bigotry, it is clear that opposition parties need something more than a technocratic defense of the status quo or appeals in defense of institutions that, for so many, don’t work. What they need are leaders who can speak plainly to the needs of ordinary working people, who can articulate a progressive, pro-democracy project in a way that always broadens the umbrella, as Lula has done. That he emerged in such difficult circumstances, and endured so much along the way, certainly speaks to his gifts; anyone who has ever heard him speak or been in his presence will tell you that his charisma is disarming. The way Lula himself would prefer to see it is that anyone can lead.
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