Lula expected to advance to Oct. 25 runoff against Flávio Bolsonaro
Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, 80, is seeking a fourth term in Sunday’s first-round vote, with a likely Oct. 25 runoff against Sen. Flávio Bolsonaro, the 45-year-old son of former President Jair Bolsonaro. A victory would make da Silva one of the world’s longest-serving democratically elected leaders, but his enduring grip on the Workers’ Party he co-founded has left it without a clear successor as the broader South American left suffers a string of regional defeats.
Sunday’s election serves as a test of a wager da Silva has made about his own indispensability. He maintains he is the only person capable of beating the country’s right-wing opposition, telling a recent YouTube podcast: “There are moments in politics, like in soccer, when you don’t have as many star players as you would like.” A loss in the likely runoff could leave the Workers’ Party shut out of power for years, becoming another Latin American political movement that fails to outlive its founders.
Da Silva is expected to advance to a runoff with Flávio Bolsonaro. The race, according to The Wall Street Journal, is razor-thin, and the question of succession has taken on new urgency, according to political scientist Leandro Gabiati, director at Dominium Public Affairs. “With da Silva’s defeat in a likely runoff now a real possibility and new figures fast emerging on the political right, the search for a political heir is more urgent than ever,” Gabiati said.
The succession problem is rooted in da Silva’s personal dominance. “Lula is perhaps the most important political leader of the century,” said João Paulo Rodrigues, leader of the Landless Workers’ Movement. “Anyone you put next to him looks tiny by comparison.” Handpicked successors have either faltered — like Dilma Rousseff, who was impeached in 2016 — or lost, like Fernando Haddad in 2018. Brazil’s left turns to da Silva because no one else commands national authority, but each run makes it harder for anyone else to rise up. Rodrigues said he would consider running for president one day, but that there was little point in contemplating a post-Lula future before that moment actually arrived. Jokingly citing Karl Marx, he said: “Mankind always sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve.”
Another term would let da Silva manage the transition from the presidency while in office. A loss, Gabiati noted, would leave the left struggling to find its next leader without the influence and machinery of government. Across South America, the left has suffered a string of defeats as the region has taken a rightward turn driven by economic and security concerns, leaving da Silva as the last remaining leftist stalwart on the continent.
Da Silva has worked to demonstrate that he is physically capable of serving another four years. Concerns about his age resurfaced two years ago after he fell in the palace bathroom while cutting his nails and underwent emergency surgery to drain a brain bleed. He has since posted shirtless social-media videos of himself at the gym pounding a treadmill and doing squats. With his 10th grandchild on the way, he has brushed aside comparisons with former U.S. President Joe Biden and joked that his new wife, 20 years his junior, can vouch for his “youthful stamina.”
His resilience is part of a longer political biography. The son of illiterate farmworkers from Brazil’s impoverished northeast, da Silva spent 13 days traveling by truck to São Paulo state as a child before becoming a metalworker, losing a finger in a factory accident and rising through the union movement to the presidency. He has survived a military dictatorship, throat and skin cancers, a vast corruption scandal that landed him in jail in 2018, and an alleged assassination plot by Jair Bolsonaro’s allies.
He is already the longest-serving president in Brazil’s democratic history. Another four-year term would match Angela Merkel’s tenure as German chancellor and surpass every U.S. president, including Franklin D. Roosevelt, trailing only a handful of long-serving leaders in modern democracies — mostly prime ministers who face no constitutional term limits.
Even some of his fiercest critics acknowledge da Silva to be a political animal like few others, with an instinct for crowds and a mastery of Brazil’s transactional politics, turning enemies into allies and holding together unwieldy coalitions. That charm has won over a motley crew of foreign leaders. Former President Barack Obama once called him “my man,” Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad referred to him as a “good friend,” and President Trump declared they had “excellent chemistry” after what Trump described as a 39-second encounter at the United Nations General Assembly last year.
Da Silva’s dominance has proved both the Workers’ Party’s greatest asset and its ultimate weakness. As Brazil’s first working-class president, his personal bond with poorer voters transcends his party’s brand. Even poorer voters who see him as tainted by corruption still view him as the politician most likely to stand up for them in a brutally unequal country, where the poorest half of the population — more than 100 million people — still hold less than 3% of household wealth. “The poor always get screwed here but Lula screwed us a bit less,” said Pedro Alves, a construction worker in São Paulo, who said he had managed to put his son into college thanks to a government-backed student loan program expanded under the Workers’ Party.
The runoff against Flávio Bolsonaro, if it materializes, will test whether that appeal is enough to carry the 80-year-old incumbent past the 45-year-old senator and son of former President Jair Bolsonaro. The Journal described Sunday’s race as razor-thin; a loss for da Silva would test the future of the Workers’ Party he co-founded 46 years ago.