When I moved to Rio de Janeiro to work as a foreign correspondent in the early 1990s, most of my friends, then in their 20s and 30s, were upset that a burly metalworker who campaigned for president on a radical Marxist platform that included income redistribution, defaulting on the country’s debt — nearly $115 billion in 1989 — and blaming the country’s severe economic crisis on outside forces, had lost the country’s first direct democratic presidential election in 1989.
After nearly 30 years of dictatorship and four years under the military’s puppet ruler José Sarney, my upper middle class friends were keen to vote in Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who hailed from the country’s impoverished Northeast and had no real plans to stem hyperinflation that rose to about 2,500% a year when I lived there. (The joke going around Rio at that time was that hyperinflation meant it was cheaper to take a taxi rather than a bus, because you only paid for the taxi at the end of your journey, and the bus required payment at the beginning.)
Still, I could understand Lula’s appeal among my friends. Many of them had family who had suffered repression under Brazil’s brutal military regimes between 1964 and 1985.
Despite his popularity among young voters, Lula lost in 1989, and again in 1994 and in 1998. His win finally came in 2002, and he served two terms until 2011, winning a third term in 2022 despite his conviction in the country’s largest corruption scandal. In 2018, he was convicted of taking bribes from engineering firms in return for public contracts and spent a year and a half behind bars, until the Supreme Court ruled that he could appeal his case.
Lula and members of his party called the investigation a political smear campaign against them. Even then, some of my Brazilian friends were quick to defend him.
But now on Sunday, as nearly 159 million Brazilians head to the polls, many of those friends have had enough of Lula, now 80, and vying for his fourth term in office.
“Brazil under 20 years of Workers’ Party rule has become a Nicaragua,” said a Rio-based psychologist, who told The Post she is voting for his closest rival, Flávio Bolsonaro, a right-wing federal senator and the eldest son of former president Jair Bolsonaro, who is serving a 27-year term under house arrest for an attempted coup after he lost the 2022 election.
Flávio himself is currently under criminal investigation for allegedly taking millions in cash from a disgraced banker in order to finance a film to redeem his father’s image. And last week, Lula accused him of trying to remove Brazil’s patron saint — Our Lady of the Appeared Conception — if he is elected president, a rumor Flavio called “fake news.”
“At least with Bolsonaro, he will have a serious group of economists committed to fixing the mess created by years of Lula government,” said the psychologist, adding that in some quarters things are so bad that food delivery apps are allowing diners to pay for a pizza delivery in installments on their credit card if they can’t afford the full price.
“There’s something very wrong with a society where this is happening,” said the psychologist.
Although inflation has been tamed at just over 4% a year, affordability is still a big issue and the Workers’ Party has lost much of the youthful support that was present when Lula first ran for president in 1989. A June Quaest poll found that young people have lost confidence in the Marxist leader and many — as much as 38 percent — are now identifying themselves as right wing.
“Lula? He’s just going to turn this country into another Venezuela,” said a construction worker from Minas Gerais, who moved to Portugal to find a job. Although Brazil no longer maintains ties to Nicaragua over leader Daniel Ortega’s slide into authoritarian rule, it sees itself as the leading leftist power in Latin America.
According to the most recent DataFolha poll, Lula holds a thin lead at 40% over Flávio Bolsonaro. If no candidate wins more than 50% of valid votes in Sunday’s first round, the two front-runners will advance to a runoff on Oct. 25.
Desperate for another win, Lula is pulling out all the stops. He convinced Bad Bunny to allow an adaptation of his hit “Lo que le pasó a Hawaii” to sing his praises on the eve of the first round of voting, and has doubled down on attacks against President Trump, blaming Brazil’s chronic economic problems on the US’s 25% tariffs imposed on Brazilian products in July.
“I can’t stand Lula now,” said one of my old friends in Rio, a writer, who once embraced the Marxist maverick. “I’m holding my nose when I get to the polls on Sunday, but I just can’t vote for Flavio.”
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