On October 30th, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva was elected for his third term as Brazil’s president. This was by no means a guaranteed victory; the race between leftist Lula and far-right incumbent Jair Bolsonaro was deeply polarized, personal, and competitive. In fact, in the official election on October 2nd neither candidate received the full 50% of the vote necessary to win, meaning the race would extend to a runoff on October 30th. Lula clinched the highest office by a mere 1.8% of the vote, with his 50.9% to Bolsonaro’s 49.1%. Historically, this is the first time in the 34 years of Brazil’s democracy that the incumbent did not win their election, an indication that Bolsonaro’s far-right extremism did not win over the majority of Brazilians. But despite the success of democracy on October 30, what can we expect to see from Brazil, and Lula, going forward? What does his re-election mean for the future of democracy?

Lula was born in 1945 to poor farmers in the northeast of Brazil, but his family moved while Lula was young to Sao Paulo in search of better opportunities. While he initially enrolled in school, he eventually dropped out to get a job as a shoe-shiner, and later one in a metalworking factory. It was in his 20s that Lula became involved in trade-union activism, rising up to union leader and eventually elected as president of the metalworking trade union. After organizing a series of strikes against Brazil’s dictatorship at the time, Lula and a group of workers, artists, and intellectuals founded the Workers’ Party in 1980 in opposition to the military regime. He first ran for president in 1989, but it was not until 2002 that he was first elected. Running on a platform of economic expansion, poverty alleviation, and climate protection, Lula aimed to distribute a regular flow of food and monetary aid to the almost 44 million people living below the poverty line at the time. Under the umbrella of his Fome Zero, or Zero Hunger program, Lula increased spending on state safety-net programs (such as School Grants which provided families with stipends for each child attending school) and cultivated a new sense of corporate social responsibility to the public sectors. During his first tenure, Lula was successful in lifting at least 20 million Brazilians from poverty, revitalizing the oil industry, and reduced the rate of deforestation in the Amazon by 67 percent. He left office in 2011 with an 80% approval rating and the title of “the most popular politician on Earth” granted by former-US President Barack Obama. 

However, Lula’s popularity soon took a hit, as scandal erupted in 2014. Operation Lava Jato (Car Wash) exposed corruption between the executives of the state oil company Petrobras and the construction firms, who bribed Petrobras to give them inflated contracts. Lula’s Party, the Workers’ Party, was dragged into the scandal for having used the extra funds from the construction firms to pay off politicians and buy their votes. Lula himself was found guilty for having been given an apartment in return for helping to negotiate contracts with Petrobras. Although he maintained it was all a plot carried out by his opponents to prevent him from running in the next election, he was sentenced to 12 years in prison in 2018. A year later, messages were leaked indicating that the presiding judge of the case, Sergio Moro, had consulted and collaborated with the prosecutors. Lula was subsequently released from prison, and in 2021 the Supreme Court threw out his case on the grounds that it was biased. This granted Lula the freedom to run for reelection, but his trustworthiness has been repeatedly questioned by the far right ever since. 

In his 2022 campaign, Lula stressed a similar platform as he did back in the early 2000s. Brazil still faces many of the same challenges, including high rates of poverty, a struggling economy, and destruction of the rainforest. After four years of Bolsonaro’s agenda, much of what Lula was able to expand during his first tenure has been scaled back. His proposed policies include expanding the size of the state, adding up to ten new ministries in an attempt to even out responsibilities and broaden opportunities. Lula’s government will also return to the empowerment of state-run companies, opposing the move towards privatization that occurred under Bolsonaro’s regime, believing that the state should play a key role in monitoring strategic sectors such as energy power and the post. He has also mentioned a tax reform designed to exempt low-earners from paying income tax, targeting the tens of millions living below the poverty line. When it comes to foreign policy, Lula has been consistent in his message that Brazil deserves a place at the international table. This includes maintaining its dedication to multilateral institutions, such as BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa), and taking on the role as a non-violent mediator in international disputes. Lula has already hinted at this desire in his commentary on the war in Ukraine, taking a rather controversial perspective that it is not just Putin who is guilty of war, but also the US, the EU, and President Zelensky of Ukraine as well. In an interview with Time Magazine back in May 2022, he said that his goal is to “create a new global governance…to rebuild the U.N., to include more countries and more people.” How Lula intends to carry out such ideas has yet to be fully outlined. 

Another major item on the agenda is climate: under Bolsonaro, funding for environmental protection agencies were slashed, illegal mining was encouraged, and in just two years over 12,000 square miles of the Amazon Rainforest was lost. Lula has pledged to reduce deforestation to zero percent, stand up for indigenous communities, and act as a leader for climate change action in the international world. These first steps are being taken as Lula attends COP27, the UN Climate Change Conference currently unfolding in Egypt, in a demonstration of his commitment to solving the climate crisis. 

Despite Lula’s victory in the election, the road forward is not smooth. Lula is facing a deeply divided country and a deeply divided government. Introducing changes at the governmental level will not be easy: the legislative branch is dominated by conservatives, many of whom oppose Lula and his agenda. Lula will have to toe the line between forming “pragmatic alliances” with the centre/centre-right and meeting his supporters’ expectations. Furthermore, Bolsonaro’s legacy has created a society ripe with misinformation and a distrust of the political system. In the lead up to the election, Bolsonaro declared that there were only three possible outcomes – death, arrest, or victory – that he would accept. Given that Bolsonaro was one of the last world leaders to accept the results of the US 2020 elections, his words caused great concern that the democratic process would not be respected. After Lula’s victory Bolsonaro did not make a statement for two days, and when he did speak it was not an acknowledgement of his defeat; that said, the democratic process and the transition of power is underway. However, the months and years Bolsonaro has spent casting doubt on the election process will not so easily disappear. While democracy has prevailed in the short term, long-lasting damage will take a long time to repair. Lula will need to take significant steps in restoring faith in Brazil’s democratic process and easing bipolarity if he wishes for his words to come true: “there are not two Brazils. We are one country, one people, one great nation.”