The enduring charisma of Brazil’s working-class president

A better title for this book might have been ‘Lula: A Drama’. In the first of two long- anticipated volumes, Fernando Morais has delivered an unconventional but riveting account of the key moments of tumult in the career of Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (2003-11; 2023-present). A veteran journalist, Morais is clinical in his detail of the underground union gatherings, abject poverty and family tragedy which formed Lula. He brings São Paulo’s working-class culture to life throughout, with popular car brands, pop songs and sessions of cachaça and gin rummy ever present.

Lula’s upbringing was marred by hardship. Born in poverty in 1945, with a brutal, bigamist father, he began work at a young age and his family moved regularly, at one point occupying rooms at the back of a bar. As a lathe operator, he lost a finger in a workplace accident, and his first wife died in childbirth, after which he immersed himself in the São Paulo unions. His direct experience of hardship shaped his devotion to working-class interests rather than loyalty to any specific left-wing ideal.

This was particularly evident in his leadership of the 1980 strikes in the ABC Metalworkers’ Union, where he was bold in his opposition to military dictatorship, yet showed a political independence which put him at odds with other union leaders. He prioritised the wage recuperation campaign, following fraud by the finance minister Delfim Netto, over other political objectives – though his communist brother, Frei Chico, saw things differently.