Virendra Pandit
New Delhi: Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Monday congratulated veteran Leftist leader Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva for his consecutive fourth term re-election as President of Brazil, the largest and most populous country in Latin America, defeating an ally of US President Donald Trump, the media reported.
Da Silva came from behind to win Brazil’s runoff election, halting a right-wing wave sweeping Latin America and defying media and academia predictions that the 80-year-old political veteran had finally reached the end of his extraordinary career.
The electoral court declared Lula the winner with 51.76% of the vote to Flávio Bolsonaro’s 48.24% on Sunday, after a messy election day marked by allegations of voter suppression and a last-minute extension of voting hours. Bolsonaro is seen as a Trump ally.
It was a stunning victory, one that will upend markets, eked out in the 11th-hour and that saw voters from Lula’s heartland in Brazil’s poorest region rally to the rescue of the Leftist leader who has been the face of the region’s resistance to Trumpism.
For investors who had been banking on Bolsonaro to fix Brazil’s fiscal accounts, Lula’s win is a big blow. While Bolsonaro had yet to outline much of his proposals to cut spending, traders had been piling into the country’s markets on the hope he would be more committed to doing so than Lula, who has focused more on boosting growth through consumption than addressing Brazil’s dire fiscal situation
His re-election for an unprecedented fourth term extends a political career spanning more than four decades and delivers a humiliating blow to the movement built by former President Jair Bolsonaro, whose eldest son sought to carry the family name and MAGA-tinged brand of populism back to the presidential palace.
Already Brazil’s oldest president, Lula now has four more years to steady Latin America’s biggest economy — and try to ease the political polarization laid bare by a bitter campaign.
Brazil is split between unreconcilable ideologies. Lula’s identity and convictions were forged by his rise as a trade union leader, resistance to Brazil’s dictatorship and criticism of US military interventions overseas. Those of his arch-nemesis are defined by patriarchal conservatism, evangelical zeal and free-wheeling capitalism.
Lula also faces significant economic headwinds ahead, chief among them tackling rising deficits and debt that have kept interest rates high. That has driven anxieties among investors; more pressing for Lula, it has left Brazilian households drowning in debt, with personal loan defaults rising to their highest levels in two decades.
Lula ended his second consecutive term in 2010 with an approval rating of 83%, the kind of number politicians can only dream of today. Barack Obama, whose presidency overlapped with Lula’s final two years in office, famously called him “the most popular politician on Earth.”
But those days are long gone. Successive versions of Lula, tainted by corruption scandals and a stint in jail, saw the shine come off. Even when he staged his first comeback to ward off a second term of Jair Bolsonaro, the sense was that he had brought an old script for Brazil’s long-festering problems and new ones. Public handouts weren’t the answer for a new, younger generation growing up in a gig economy, or uberization of labour.
His refusal to own a mobile phone, until the last week of the campaign, was a telling sign that Lula, who once had his finger on the pulse of the nation, was now out of touch.
Indeed, he came perilously close to witnessing the end of his storied career. Bolsonaro, the son and political heir of the former president who led Brazil from 2019 to 2022, won the first round of the election on October 4.
Bolsonaro acted like a man who had already won, probably because no one who came second in the first round had pulled off a runoff reversal since Brazil returned to democracy in 1989. But his confidence was misjudged. If there’s one thing any politician knows about Lula, the great survivor of Brazilian politics, it’s that he doesn’t give up.
Still, the scale of the challenges ahead has perhaps never been bigger. He also has no clear political heir in sight and aging is clearly an issue (he had sworn not to run in this election, before changing his mind).
In Lula’s third term, unemployment fell to near historic lows, reaching 5.4% in July, while the economy grew faster than that of the US and repeatedly exceeded economists’ forecasts.
Yet Lula’s approval ratings hit a historic low during his current tenure, a stark reminder that many Brazilians have yet to feel any gain in their wallets amid rising inflation that has fed a cost-of-living crisis.
He has promised a fiscal adjustment without spelling out how he intends to deliver it, while making clear that he won’t sacrifice his social agenda to satisfy pressure from financial markets.
When Lula returned to power in 2023, after serving a prison term on corruption charges that were later quashed, he said that he’d inherited a country “destroyed” by Bolsonaro. He also found a more complex Brazil and a hostile international environment, with a more aggressive US increasingly concerned about China’s expanding presence in the Latin American region.
Yet Lula found his own way to deal with Donald Trump. As the US leader stepped up his bullying of Brazil, escalating his tariff threat, Lula held his ground. Quite unexpectedly, the two men amicably crossed paths at the United Nations General Assembly in 2025 and a few months later Trump invited Lula to the White House and praised Lula’s intelligence and found him to be a “good man.”
At home, Lula’s priorities include setting rules for the development of Brazil’s critical minerals industry. The country holds the world’s second-largest reserves of rare earths after China, drawing growing interest in recent months from foreign governments and companies seeking a foothold in the sector.
Pulling off not one, but two comebacks, was almost the easy part. If Lula wants to seal his political legacy as something more than a survivor he’ll need to use this last shot to uproot the ills that for decades have stopped Brazil from reaching its potential.