Beating Bolsonaro

In November 2019, after 580 days behind bars, Lula was released from prison. He had been jailed on feeble grounds as part of a larger judicial effort known as Operation Car Wash, which, in the name of fighting corruption, was found to have violated key constitutional precepts. Lula had maintained his innocence of any wrongdoing as an international solidarity campaign galvanized progressives the world over. Suddenly the Brazilian left had its most effective spokesman charging back into the fray as the country withered under Bolsonaro’s implacable and incompetent reactionary leadership. Lula asserted that he left prison further to the left than when he went in, suggesting that he would be stepping up his rhetoric against the entrenched conservative forces in the media, finance, and government that laid the groundwork for Bolsonaro’s ascension.

In March 2021, when the Federal Supreme Court ruled that Lula could run for office in 2022, markets panicked. His renewed political eligibility “sent stocks and the currency cratering, deepening some of the worst performances [that] year,” Bloomberg reported. Investors told Reuters that “the prospect of Bolsonaro running against Lula pits two ‘populist’ candidates against each other, hollowing out the center ground, which is more fertile for the economic reforms Brazil desperately needs.” Such hand-wringing ignored the obvious differences between the incumbent and the would-be challenger who unsuccessfully ran for president three times before finally breaking through in 2002. Indeed, two years into Bolsonaro’s disastrous term, even center-right figures noted Lula’s ability to build bridges, a dig at Bolsonaro’s inability to do so. As in 2002, when Lula promised a plausible social democratic alternative to the deprivations of neoliberalism, there appeared an opening for his singular appeal.

In a speech at the metalworkers’ union headquarters in São Bernardo do Campo where Lula’s public life began, he struck a conciliatory tone. Making clear he intended to seek the presidency once again, he emphasized the need for common sense and basic governing skills. “It is always important to reiterate whenever you can,” he declared, “the planet is round . . . and Bolsonaro doesn’t know it.” He outlined all the steps he would have taken had he been in office when the pandemic struck, each measure more sensible than the last. When asked about the notion of a broad front against Bolsonaro, Lula made a familial analogy: “Anyone who sits at a dinner table with five children and sees them fighting over one more steak and has to compromise to make them happy knows that there is no difficulty in building an alliance when the time comes.” Widespread political support would follow, he argued, “if we have the ability to talk to other political forces that are not on the left end of the spectrum. Is it possible? It is.”

Soon an electoral strategy came into view: Lula would not be running as a leftist firebrand but as a consensus builder staking out a broad swathe of the electorate from the center-right to the far left. It is unclear whether any other political figure in the broad progressive camp could plausibly pull this off. But Lula, who combined hard-fought credibility among the poor and working class with a record of responsible, market-friendly governance, seemed well positioned to assemble an eclectic coalition as Bolsonaro lurched from crisis to crisis and torched Brazil’s international standing. Both the then speaker of the house, elected to his influential position with Bolsonaro’s support, and the previous one, a center-right figure whose party had hinted it might endorse Bolsonaro in 2022, signaled an openness to Lula’s rehabilitation. Whatever one thought of his political views, Lula was an eminently reasonable figure compared to Bolsonaro.

As the 2022 race got underway, Lula placed defending democracy — rather than radical redistribution — at the center of his campaign. In the face of Bolsonaro’s frequent anti-institutional outbursts, rank homophobia, and obscurantism, Lula sought to position himself as a unifier, capable of transcending traditional partisan divides in the name of a democratic system less than forty years old. The centerpiece of this strategy was the choice of his running mate, former São Paulo governor Geraldo Alckmin. A deeply conservative Catholic, Alckmin had sought the presidency twice before as a member of the PSDB, facing off with Lula in the 2006 runoff. In 2017, as Lula contemplated a presidential run before being arrested, Alckmin accused the former president of wanting “to return to the scene of the crime.” Now, with Alckmin switching to the Brazilian Socialist Party, they found themselves on the same side. This arrangement was the product of discreet machinations of Lula allies in the PT and beyond and became Exhibit A in the case that he could work productively outside his ideological silo.

Alckmin, by all accounts, abhorred Bolsonaro and wanted badly to associate himself with his most plausible challenger. His presence on the ticket likely also helped other, decidedly nonleftist figures make their way to endorsing Lula. After it became clear that Lula and Bolsonaro would face each other in a runoff, the former president assembled the largest partisan coalition of his career; eleven parties backed him to Bolsonaro’s five. The framing of the race as a binary choice between democracy and authoritarianism become even clearer in the second round and resonated with the country’s political center and center right, not just the Left. With time, the PT could point to a wide range of prominent political actors who one by one set aside their past animosity toward Lula to support him against Bolsonaro. “There are many people who were never part of the PT and who participated in my government. And that is how it will be,” Lula asserted. “It will not be a PT government; it will be a government of the Brazilian people.”

But Lula’s appeal was not merely popular. He recognized the need to placate powerful constituencies linked, for example, to the country’s highly capitalized agricultural sector — a pillar of Bolsonaro’s well-organized and deeply funded support — and the virulently reactionary Evangelical faith leaders who hold enormous sway in a nation where Catholic influence is on the wane. During the campaign, Alckmin served as Lula’s personal liaison to Big Ag, which has always distrusted Lula’s decades-long ties to the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST), while Lula himself expressed an eagerness to win the support of conservative Christians by highlighting his own traditionalist views on issues like abortion and legalizing drugs.

Other than generic references to the need for depoliticization, Lula had relatively little to say about the armed forces, empowered politically by Bolsonaro like no president in several decades. Lula made clear that he would not be out for revenge against members of the military brass who flouted convention by cozying up to his political rival. Naturally, not everyone was won over. As André Singer observed, “The layer of the ruling class that acts as the central nervous system of the Brazilian bourgeoisie — and whose interests (in banking, manufacturing, heavy industry, culture) are most directly related to the nucleus of global capitalism, especially through financial intermediation — was reluctant until the very last to join Lula’s cross-section of supporters.” Bolsonaro managed to maintain considerable support from both elite and grassroots sectors, but Lula’s electoral coalition proved larger and more diverse.

That heterogeneity carried the seeds of future dilemmas. How hard would Lula push on the issues that most animated his longtime base of support given the eagerness with which he accepted the backing of more conservative actors? Was he setting himself up for an inevitable betrayal of at least one part of his coalition? Would it really be possible, for example, to reconcile the urgency of a robust ecological agenda with the economic imperatives of large-scale agricultural production? Furthermore, as one columnist put it at the time, “The broad front in the second round was so large that it will be impossible for Lula (or any PT candidate) to repeat the feat. In an electoral context, the PT believes that people will be led to conclude that support for Lula has melted away in four years.” These are debates the party entertained but rightfully put to bed almost immediately. After all, given the stakes of the election, the priority was winning. The party could wrestle later with the messy implications of precisely how it had won.

Lula’s Third Term

“It is time to put down the arms we never should have picked up,” Lula said on election night once it became clear victory was his. He insisted that “Brazil is back” and promised to “work tirelessly for a Brazil where love prevails over hate, truth over lies, and hope is bigger than fear.” As the traditional jockeying over cabinet nominations and other federal appointments began, it was too soon to wonder how Lula might maintain the support of individuals with widely varying ideologies over the next four years when the central narrative of defending democracy inevitably waned in importance. It was easy to imagine that things had more or less returned to normal concerning politics.

By treating the dawn of a new Lula administration as essentially the same as previous terms — with positions routinely doled out to various allied parties in rough proportion to their representation in Congress — the government missed an opportunity to impress upon the new political landscape a point that had been made incessantly during the campaign — namely, that this perilous moment for Brazilian institutions required pro-democracy parties to act in concert rather than as individual agglomerations with distinct motivations. In hindsight, Lula should have created a concrete structure around the broad front, “with personalities, with an address, with positions of support for the government, with proposals and criticisms. With the face of a broad front. Like the parties have.” So argued Dirceu, perhaps the most important strategic thinker in the PT’s history, in July 2024.

The failure to institutionalize the broad front meant that the PT lost its hold on the coalition narrative it had managed to construct in 2022. Critical support was often forthcoming from centrist forces in Congress, but the optics of the third Lula term quickly devolved into PT actors negotiating with everyone else in service of Lula’s agenda. The broad front became a relic of the last campaign rather than a fixture of the new conjuncture characterized by an enduring threat from the far right.

To be fair, such machinations seemed unnecessary early on, as political developments seemed to assemble leaders in a pro-democracy direction organically. During his campaign, Lula had argued that the country needed cooler heads in power; the week after his inauguration made clear that a significant segment of the country rejected reconciliation. On January 8, 2023, a week after Lula’s inauguration, Bolsonaro supporters staged an insurrection in Brasília, drawing instant comparisons to the US Capitol invasion by Donald Trump supporters two years prior. Enraged by Bolsonaro’s defeat, rioters clad in the national colors stormed key government buildings and did millions of dollars’ worth of damage. Proving the point of Lula’s victorious campaign, the attack revealed a long-standing authoritarian streak in Brazilian politics that contested not just a failed election or presidential bid but democracy itself.

Lula responded forcefully, denouncing the rioters as “fascists” and invoking federal intervention to restore order and investigate security lapses. Many prominent Bolsonaro supporters decried the violence even as they accused the government of overreaching with mass arrests. Nevertheless, Lula seemed invigorated by the challenge. His righteous indignation was on full display in the days that followed as his administration pushed forward with an aggressive legalistic response to defend Brazil’s democratic institutions. International leaders, including US president Joe Biden and French president Emmanuel Macron, rallied behind Lula, celebrating the country’s democratic resilience. While deeply unsettling, the moment underscored the far right’s challenge to Brazil’s democratic framework, with Lula positioning himself as a defender of democracy against its dogged enemies. The lack of unity and clear direction among Bolsonaro’s supporters post-riot reflected the political disarray on the Right, which promised to strengthen the president’s ability to respond to future threats against democracy.

But the salience of January 8 has ebbed with time. Lula’s government has had notable successes, including passing a simplification of the country’s arcane tax code and presiding over both the largest post-pandemic real wage increases among major economies and some of the lowest unemployment rates on record. Yet inflation remains stubbornly high, which has led to a drop in Lula’s approval rating steeper than any he had previously experienced in office. Diagnoses abound for this turn of events. Some point simply to the incumbent fatigue afflicting leaders all over the world. Like Joe Biden, for example, Lula is an aging longtime politician struggling to adapt to a new political media ecosystem, and his positive economic story is not translating into robust popular support.

Others, from differing angles, fault Lula’s handling of the critically important broad front that delivered him the presidency. Expressing the view of many market-oriented analysts, economist Fabio Giambiagi lambasted Lula’s spending and foreign policy as a betrayal of the trust moderates had placed in him. “Lula gave some somewhat decorative positions to people not linked to the PT. Then he met with Nicolás Maduro and began to attack [Central Bank president] Roberto Campos Neto and ‘Brazilianize’ the prices charged by Petrobras, undermining the company’s yearslong efforts to put its accounts in order after the dramatic situation experienced in the mid-2010s.” From Giambiagi’s perspective, “The PT had a second historic opportunity to form an alliance and wasted it. We can be fooled once, twice. But in life’s learning, we will hardly be fooled a third time. I believe that there is zero chance of reestablishing a broad front in the future.” As of now, many of the centrists who held their nose and voted for Lula last time because they found Bolsonaro so objectionable seem ready to support supposedly moderate right-wing alternatives.

Some on the Left, by contrast, argue the problem is that Lula has actually been too enthralled by the broad-front mentality. In a memorable late-2024 interview, Gleisi Hoffmann, the president of the PT, asserted that the party would not sacrifice its left-wing identity to appease its governing partners. “We had political dialogue with the center during the campaign and expanded it in government. They tried to kill the PT and failed,” stated Hoffmann, who took over the party in the wake of Rousseff’s ouster and steered it through the trying years of Lula’s trial and imprisonment. “They cannot now ask the PT to commit suicide, breaking with the social base that brought us here.”

This was interpreted as a shot across the bow at Finance Minister Fernando Haddad, who, while overseeing a concerted effort to pass a more progressive tax system in one of the most unequal countries on earth, has pursued moderate fiscal policies to placate market actors. There is a history of behind-the-scenes tensions between Hoffmann and Haddad, the PT’s presidential nominee in 2018. But Haddad is only in his current position because Lula put him there. Critics of Haddad’s approach are actually arguing about Lula’s ideological orientation. Rather than focusing on the demobilizing spending cuts that market actors would like to see, for example, PT congressman Lindbergh Farias argues that “we have to change the subject, we have to get involved in the people’s agenda. My line now is that 2025 is Lula’s year. It’s Lula being Lula. It’s Lula talking about people’s lives” and all the new social programs implemented since his return to power. No matter how big the tent, it can be hard to move inside if you let too many people in. At some point, Lula has to act like Lula.

To what extent might the major policies of Lula’s third term be presented as a unified political argument? First, the obvious: Lula has acted as a consummate democrat, fulfilling the basic promise that he would not constantly test the country’s political institutions as Bolsonaro had. More substantively, the administration can credibly claim to have advanced on its priority of lessening inequality. The comprehensive tax overhaul enacted in December 2023 consolidates multiple consumption taxes into a streamlined system featuring the goods and services tax, the subnational tax on goods and services, and a federal excise tax. The new system is designed to lower the average consumption tax rate from 34 percent to approximately 26.5 percent, thereby reducing the tax burden on lower-income households and promoting economic equality in a highly stratified society. Many presidents have tried and failed to pass a reform of this kind, yet it will not take full effect until 2033, which will likely blunt some of the political benefit for the current administration.

The government has also made a point of increasing the minimum wage above the rate of inflation, contributing to real income gains for the lowest earners, retirees, and beneficiaries of other public programs that use the minimum wage as a benchmark for benefits. Additionally, the government has expanded the income-tax exemption threshold, raising it from R$1,900 per month in early 2023 to R$2,824 by February 2024, effectively removing millions of Brazilians from the country’s tax base and increasing disposable income for low-wage workers (this move is supposed to be offset by increased taxation on the richest Brazilians, but that matter is currently stuck in the legislature).

Haddad also oversaw passage of a fiscal framework to replace the more austere spending-cap system introduced under former president Michel Temer. The arcabouço fiscal, as the new arrangement is known, allows for modest growth in annual public spending in accordance with revenue performance. Crucially, it exempts key social expenditures from spending caps, safeguarding essential services. This design aims to balance fiscal responsibility with Lula’s redistributive agenda, enabling ongoing investments in welfare, education, and health care. It has nevertheless drawn fire from both the Left, which argues that by fetishizing fiscal restraint the government gives too much ground to neoliberal thinking, and the Right, which insists the measure does not go far enough in reining in government spending.

There is no doubt that Lula’s third term will end on more solid economic footing than it began on, in no small part because of the policies the government has pursued. But the administration’s aversion to courting any kind of conflict means that many of the most tangible benefits of the various economic measures are years away from being felt. Further complicating matters for Lula this time is the fact that Bolsonaro handed enormous amounts of discretionary power over the federal budget to individual lawmakers, a dynamic that has been hard for Lula to reverse.

Traditional politicking has become more difficult for the president as members of Congress wield more power than ever. Lula’s government has struggled to maintain high levels of public support in this deeply polarized political climate. In a post-Bolsonaro context, it is no small thing that Lula revived the major pieces of his social agenda from twenty years ago. But there is a dearth of creative new thinking, which speaks to the novel constraints of this moment. From where will fresh ideas emerge? The broad front painstakingly assembled in 2022 was premised on the notion that Lula was the most viable candidate to defeat Bolsonaro and that, as a committed democrat, his return would benefit all players. What happens if powerful actors reject these fundamental premises next year?

Lula may well have become a victim of his own past political success. Given his personal and ideological style, he has always governed as a pragmatist, including in his orbit representatives of the traditional political elite that has benefited from proximity to power since the early nineteenth century. This approach was not called a broad front twenty-two years ago, when Lula first took office, but it was widely understood that in order to govern — to begin delivering on what André Singer has called a “Rooseveltian dream” for Brazil — Lula and the PT would have to make substantive concessions to a panoply of political forces to their right. For the sake of winning and holding on to power, the PT deemphasized a radical wide-ranging redistributive agenda even as it managed to implement a host of genuinely transformative social policies.

This approach, messy and transactional as it was, delivered. Now, however, whenever Lula displeases this or that coalition partner, he is accused of either failing to meet the high bar of consensus implied by the broad-front strategy pursued in 2022 or displaying insufficient concern for the health of Brazilian democracy. The political onus is apparently on the president to keep everyone happy rather than on the coalition as a whole to defeat the far-right threat that united them in the first place. By making so much of the urgent menace of Bolsonarismo, Lula has inadvertently placed himself in a politically precarious position.

The Next Campaign

Lula has insisted that he is eager to run for president one last time in 2026, but both he and the First Lady have seemingly left the door open to withdraw for health reasons. If Lula’s standing in the polls does not improve, it is easy to imagine him backing out. Still, the same electoral question will be put to the PT whether or not he is the candidate: Whither the broad front? Notwithstanding the sui generis appeal of Bolsonaro in 2018, a broad coalition is key to electoral victory in a country with as many active political parties as Brazil.

But the articulation of a broad front goes beyond a simple partisan alliance. It signals to voters that something greater is at stake than sectarian advancement. Bolsonaro has been barred from running for office until 2030, by which point he could well be serving a lengthy prison sentence of his own for his alleged role in a plot to overthrow Lula’s elected government. It will be enormously challenging, if not impossible, for the PT to make the case to potential partners that any of the aspiring Bolsonaro stand-ins represent the grave danger that he did.

This does not mean they won’t try. Placing Lula’s government at the center of the political spectrum, Haddad last year described the president’s strategy as “a coalition to prevent the greater evil.” Furthermore, he posits that “as long as the far right has this strength and these instruments of attack, this alliance will be a protection for the country. . . . Repolarization around healthier and more democratic perspectives will require, first, the ebbing of the extreme right in Brazil and in the world.” First we must defeat right-wing extremism, those beyond the bounds of acceptable political discord, Haddad suggests. Then we can worry about besting the regular conservatives.

This logic is sound. After all, Bolsonaro may not be running, but he remains the face of a larger corrosive movement that will very much be vying for power under the guise of a moderate alternative to Lula’s supposed radicalism. The need for a broad front against democratic erosion remains. “I want to establish the best possible coexistence [with other parties], because I believe we should have a broad front for the election of President Lula, even larger than the one we had in 2022,” Hoffmann asserted in her new role as minister of institutional affairs, a position to which Lula appointed her in March. Dirceu has made a similar argument, insisting that the PT must at the same time strengthen its ties with other left-of-center parties and reanimate the broad front put together three years ago. Less than a year into his third term, Lula himself reportedly told interlocutors that he wanted an even broader front next time. But it’s unclear what kind of pull he will have in 2026 compared to 2022.

Prominent PT leaders agree on the desirability of a broad front in next year’s campaign, but it is worth asking what end it serves beyond winning an election. If and when the PT embarks on a fresh attempt to cobble together a heterogenous coalition to support Lula in the name of restraining the far right, it should be clearer about the president’s vision to defeat radical reactionaries beyond the time horizon of the next election. There is something to be said for the balancing act Lula has undertaken in office as the face of a broad front after beating Bolsonaro. Crucially, it worked. But that broad-front strategy does not, and cannot, mean that Lula is held hostage to the positions of his most conservative voters over the course of the next four years. Lula has delivered a bevy of good economic news, but criticism of government spending has been a fixture of mainstream news coverage in Brazil. Next year, Lula’s campaign should insist that a broad front cannot mean that he must embrace draconian budget cuts, as market actors have urged since his inauguration. Austerity was not the agenda the broad front assembled to implement in 2022. This should be made explicit in 2026.

Despite stylistic differences, any candidate seeking Bolsonaro’s blessing next year would almost certainly be as right-wing as the disgraced former president himself. Would the Right’s candidate conspire with high-ranking men in uniform to subvert the will of voters as Bolsonaro did? Probably not. But a successor would be willing and able to oversee a draconian economic agenda that leaves many worse off. In response, pragmatism, as always, will be Lula’s order of the day. “I am a union leader who believed in all or nothing,” he told university professors who went on strike to demand a raise and better working conditions in June 2024. “For me, it was 100 percent or it was nothing. And many times I was left with nothing.” He urged the striking members to accept the deal the government had put forth, insisting that the strike had run its course and its leaders had an obligation to recognize as much. They did soon thereafter. This case reflects Lula’s temperament as much as his political strategy in this polarized moment. Lula the radical has been glimpsed at times during this term, but the conciliatory Lula who would mediate rather than stoke class conflict has been the most consistent presence.

We will, however, almost certainly see both sides of Lula in ample measure during next year’s campaign: the bridge builder in pursuit of a new broad front and the populist firebrand attacking whichever Bolsonaro ally picks up a head of steam. Indeed, in recent months, the contours of Lula’s potential reelection pitch have come into focus. In the first round, when several candidates are likely to compete, his campaign will probably focus on economic justice and a progressive nationalist discourse. On economic justice, he will emphasize his proposal to phase out income taxes for poor and working-class Brazilians and increase them on high-income earners and on profits and dividends sent abroad.

On nationalist discourse, he will likely hammer the Brazilian right for its infatuation with Trump and Elon Musk, who has flouted Brazilian law and criticized members of the government in extremely harsh and puerile terms. These are sure to be potent electoral cudgels. The fact that the governor of São Paulo, a leading pro-Bolsonaro presidential contender, has gone notably quiet on Trump’s tariffs after celebrating the Republican’s election last year is a case in point. Despite a bevy of unfavorable polling in recent weeks, Lula cannot be counted out. He draws the ire of many, but he has managed remarkable political turnarounds before. He would not have won in 2022 were he as objectionable as his most ardent opponents believe.

It is ultimately because of Lula’s enduring electoral strength, built up over decades, that Brazil today can serve as a model in the global struggle for institutional democracy, rather than being held up as a cautionary tale of catastrophic civic decline. His political resilience, forged in the crucible of dictatorship and economic turmoil, remains a vital counterweight to the authoritarian impulses that continue to threaten democratic norms across the globe. At stake next year is whether Brazil will remain a broadly pluralistic, open society with a government attuned to the material needs of the poor and working-class majority, or settle into a more exclusionary vision of social life. A broad front should be assembled in service of the former, and not to simply ease the country into the latter more gently than Bolsonaro or his acolytes would.

No party likes to lose elections, of course, but Lula and the PT have nevertheless always kept an eye toward the next race. They successfully forged and wielded a broad front to beat back the far right at the national level in 2022. A broad front, however, should not be seen as an end in itself. The PT has spent Lula’s third term attending to the picayune demands of this or that coalition partner while diluting the effects of its substantive policy successes. While the results are not negligible, there has been a conspicuous lack of ambition, innovation, and, yes, aggressiveness from the PT’s fifth presidential administration. Ironically, by walking on eggshells in an attempt to displease no one, the party could find itself in a position where it inspires too few in the ongoing struggle against transnational reactionary obscurantism. As it plots its political future, the PT must not allow the broad front it built three years ago to become a gilded cage.