Who is the most successful politician of the 21st century? The leader who has seen his nation accumulate the most wealth and influence while maintaining power must be Chinese President Xi Jinping. But if we require that the titleholder has won competitive multi-party elections, a wider range of people have a chance. Former German Chancellor Angela Merkel governed for a long time, and with a calm hand. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi would also be in the mix.
Although it has not been a great quarter century for liberal democracy and the center left, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is surely in the race. As Lula: A People’s President and the Fight for Brazil’s Future by Andre Pagliarini recounts, Brazil’s three-term leader, who held power from 2003 to 2011 and then returned to office in 2023, rose from humble roots as a factory worker to build a union movement and then a party. He repeatedly won the presidency, using executive power to re-shape class relations within Brazil and shove the country into a more central position in the global system.
The book cover has a bold red background. At the top, the title “LULA” is written in large, white, sans-serif block letters. Below it, the subtitle reads, “A People’s President and the Fight for Brazil’s Future.” The central image shows a man with white hair and a beard from the side, wearing a blue shirt and raising his right fist high in the air. At the bottom of the cover, the author’s name, “ANDRE PAGLIARINI,” is printed in white capital letters.
Lula: A People’s President and the Fight for Brazil’s Future, Andre Pagliarini, Polity, 240 pp., $22.95, September 2025
“The best way to understand the historical significance of Lula,” Pagliarini writes, “is as a kind of incarnation of Brazil’s long-standing hopes for global ascension.” In the neoliberal era that began in the 1980s and ended sometime in the last decade, it has been difficult to build durable political organizations. But Lula’s Workers’ Party (PT), founded in 1980, became what is probably the largest political party in the Western Hemisphere, based on membership counts. It may outlast the man himself.
Later this year, Lula is likely to mount his seventh bid for the presidency of Latin America’s most populous country. In his sixth attempt, in 2022, he defeated far-right President Jair Bolsonaro, even as Bolsonaro and several associates tried to plot a coup to stay in power. Now that Bolsonaro is in prison, Brazil’s extreme right will be represented by his eldest son, Flávio. And once more, Brazil’s pro-democratic forces will call upon Lula and the PT to save them.
A smiling woman with short grey hair and black-rimmed glasses stands outdoors at night, posing in front of several large red campaign banners. She is wearing a white patterned blouse with a political campaign button pinned to her chest. She holds her right hand up, making an “L” shape with her thumb and index finger. The banners behind her feature a portrait of a bearded man; some are printed with the text “TÔ COM LULA,” while a flag on the right shows a stylized graphic of the same man above the words “VACINA & PICANHA & CERVEJA.”
A Lula supporter gestures during a campaign rally ahead of the presidential runoff in Rio de Janeiro on Oct. 11, 2022.Wagner Meier/Getty Images
The subtitle of Pagliarini’s book is “A People’s President and the Fight for Brazil’s Future,” but most of it is about the 20th century. The cautiously optimistic years of Lula’s current third term only occupy a few pages. None of the book is about what awaits the country going forward.
Instead, Pagliarini, a Brazilian American historian at Louisiana State University, has written a careful account of two separate tracks of Brazilian history. Both come together in the figure of Lula: on the left, slow and fraught attempts to create a movement in the shadows of a rapacious domestic oligarchy and U.S. imperialism; on the right, the consolidation of institutional presidential politics from the end of the Portuguese monarchy in 1889 through two dictatorships and the country’s most recent re-democratization in 1989.
Lula was born in 1945, the seventh of eight children. As a boy, he moved from the poor state of Pernambuco to the outskirts of São Paulo. The metropolitan area was a growing industrial powerhouse. While still relatively uninterested in politics, Lula landed a job in a factory. He lost a finger due to poor conditions and being overworked, and rose up the ranks to lead the metalworkers’ union.
Pagliarini capably describes Brazil’s political scene. In the early 20th century, an immigrant-led anarchist movement transformed into a domestic communist party—which was crushed by state repression in the 1930s. In the 1940s, President Getúlio Vargas enforced a corporatist pact with the working class that bound formal employees and their representatives to the state.
Then came a 1964 military coup, backed by the United States, that crushed a liberal reform movement. The regime kidnapped and murdered its perceived enemies, repressing organized labor into alignment with state interests, before eventually embarking on a slow process of abertura política (political opening) until Brazil’s re-democratization.
In 1980, Lula was arrested for organizing a strike and charged with subversion. As Lula’s biographer Fernando Morais detailed in Foreign Policy, Lula sought to create a new labor movement that was not as subservient to bosses as old trade unions. He helped found a new party comprising workers, Catholic progressives, and veterans of the anti-dictatorship struggle. In 1989, Lula participated in the first free Brazilian presidential elections in decades—and then lost three times in a row. In 2002, he finally won.
A close-up photograph displays a large collection of circular political campaign buttons pinned in neat rows against a black background. The pins feature various names, logos, and slogans in different colors. Notable designs include white pins with “Lula Brasil” written in a stylized font, white pins with a red star reading “Meu Primeiro Voto é do Lula,” blue pins featuring a hand giving a peace sign alongside the name “Mário Covas,” and pins with the name “Freire” set against a red paintbrush stroke background. One white pin prominently features a photographic portrait of a man’s face.
Campaign buttons of the candidates in the 1989 Brazilian presidential election.Francois Ancellet/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images
Readers might complain that Pagliarini’s book is really about the fight for Brazil’s history, not its future. In many ways, however, they are the same thing. If Flávio Bolsonaro defeats Lula this year and carries out the family mission of de-democratizing Brazil, Lula will mean a very different thing to history than he does now. (Brazil’s Supreme Court recently convicted another Bolsonaro son, Eduardo, of interfering in his father’s case.) But if Lula can hold on for a fourth term, the Brazilian left may be able to shape the world throughout the rest of the century.
The Brazilian left has accumulated both the legitimacy and experience to exert international influence like few other movements in the global south, Pagliarini shows. In the weeks after Brazil’s 2022 election, the apparent symmetry between the struggles of the U.S. Democratic Party and Brazil’s democratic movement led to a rare confluence of interests between North American liberals and Lula’s coalition.
Historically, Democratic U.S. presidents have been very willing to back right-wing coups in Brazil, as in the 1964 putsch that both John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson worked to make possible. Pagliarini notes, however, that Joe Biden made clear he would not abide Bolsonaro’s coup-plotting. Bolsonaro supporters launched their own tragic and farcical version of the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection two years and two days later.
But once Lula’s third term began, the PT’s differences with U.S. Democrats began to show. This was not a surprise to the South American left: Lula’s brother, a communist, was tortured by the United States-backed dictatorship in 1975. Dilma Rousseff, Lula’s chosen successor (who governed from 2011 to 2016), took up arms against that same regime in her youth as part of a Marxist-Leninist guerrilla movement; she too was imprisoned and abused by the generals.
Pagliarini recounts one famous story, in which Fidel Castro convinced Lula to stick to electoral politics after a stinging 1982 defeat in his run for governor of São Paulo. “You had a hell of a vote total,” Castro apparently told him. “Stop with this story that you were defeated. You weren’t.” In 2020, shortly after he was released from prison for a corruption conviction that was ultimately overturned amid judicial malpractice, Lula blamed Barack Obama’s State Department for the now-discredited anti-corruption drive that removed the Brazilian leader from electoral competition in 2018.
Since beginning his third term in 2023, Lula has taken positions on U.S. policy toward Ukraine and Venezuela that raised eyebrows in the United States. He insisted that Washington and Brussels bore partial responsibility for Russian’s 2022 invasion and has publicly criticized Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. In Latin America, the PT has long preferred to keep its criticisms of repressive leftist neighbors quiet rather than appearing to offer public justification for U.S. meddling. Lula has also remained committed to the BRICS bloc, even as the growing group has experienced discord and tensions with Washington.
But where Lula diverges most from the U.S. establishment is that he can find agreement with much of the rest of the globe; his skepticism of U.S. power may find influence in a world in which Washington is unable to exercise unipolar hegemony and faces increasing opposition to its violent interventions abroad. Unlike other leaders on the global center-left, Lula has a positive vision for the future—even if his dream of a multipolar world may not come to pass.
Two men in suits sit in armchairs facing each other against a dark blue curtain backdrop. On the left, a man with blond hair, a navy suit, and a bright red tie looks towards the camera with a slight smile, his hands clasped together. On the right, a man with white hair and a beard wearing a dark suit, a grey shirt, and a dark red tie gestures with his right hand while holding a red folder in his left hand. Between them sits a small side table draped with a red cloth, holding a floral arrangement and two glasses of water.
Lula gestures to U.S. President Donald Trump during a bilateral meeting on the sidelines of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations summit in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, on Oct. 26, 2025.Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images
Looking back on his campaigns in the 1980s and 1990s, as Pagliarini’s Lula does, it is striking that two of Lula’s most defining—and praiseworthy—characteristics seem contradictory.
First, he is implacably radical when in the opposition—repeatedly railing, for example, against neoliberalism. Lula proclaimed that formal democratization without deep social reform would leave reactionary forces with the real power. “[T]he issue of capital remains intact,” he said in 1988, as cited by Pagliarini. The boss “will continue to earn as much money as he did before, and will continue to distribute as little as he does today.”
But once close to power, Lula works flexibly within the existing system to deliver for regular people. As president, he has kept most of the structures he denounced as neoliberal in place and used economic growth as the basis for social programs that lift up the poor without threatening elite privileges. The most famous is Bolsa Familia, a cash transfer program for low-income families. He is a master at getting what he wants from a labyrinthine and nefarious congressional system.
This is how the Brazilian left often treats the question of corruption, which stalks both Lula and Rousseff. Lula got to Brasília in 2003 and saw that kickbacks and favors were the meat and potatoes of national politics. He could refuse to play the game, and be immediately impeached or overthrown, or he could get his hands dirty—as his conservative predecessors did—and watch tens of millions of Brazilians rise out of poverty.
A smiling woman holds up two government assistance benefit cards inside a room. In her right hand, she displays a blue card that reads “Bolsa Escola do Governo Federal,” and in her left hand, a yellow card that reads “Bolsa Família.” The background shows a simple kitchen area with wooden shelving holding upside-down glasses and kitchen containers.
Maria Nilza, 36, shows her “Bolsa Familia” social plan card in Serra Azul, Brazil, on Sept. 11, 2006.Vanderlei Almeida/AFP via Getty Images
Brazil, like the United States and China, is big enough that it mostly talks to itself, and less to outsiders. In Portuguese, Morais’ biography of Lula is the most influential account of the Brazilian president’s life so far. That book, elegiac and well-researched, was recently translated to English. But it is “not for beginners,” to borrow an old phrase originally applied to Brazil itself. The book’s structure presupposes an understanding of South American politics that few North Americans possess.
Both Celso Rocha de Barros and Lincoln Secco have written essential, though untranslated, histories of the PT. They focus more on the early party’s working-class base and its member participation. But Pagliarini is attentive to its transition to an electoral vehicle. Although he shows frequent deference to Lula and His Politics of Cunning: From Metalworker to President of Brazil by John D. French, that book is more narrowly focused on the man, and only takes English speakers as far as the beginning of the Bolsonaro presidency.
Pagliarini’s book is more focused on the Brazilian working class and its relation to the global system. It is a much-needed contribution to the popular, global understanding of Brazil that is likely to serve readers well as they bite their nails and wait for this year’s election results. (Richard Lapper’s new book, Lula!, is another addition to this canon.)
Though obviously and explicitly sympathetic to Lula, Pagliarini’s is not a left-wing account. He cites scholars and journalists from both the United States and Brazil and takes care to include prominent critiques put forward by mainstream analysts and right-leaning media, usually before offering his own rebuttal. He is conversant with observers—including U.S. media—whom the radical left of the PT, which very much still exists, dismiss as hopelessly biased, if not agents of imperialism. The possibility of this approach speaks to Lula’s unique position: Where else, these days, does a center-left party have actual fans?
Among global leaders, few aside from Lula have been able to hold back reactionary forces while also developing a transformative party platform and maneuvering to take advantage of a crumbling world order. At least for now, Pagliarini demonstrates, Lula could matter in the next phase of history.
