Lula! Resurrection: Four victories, four mandates and an entire life dedicated to the fight for human dignity (By Mamour Sop Ndiaye, Professor and researcher in Brazil)

Through the exceptional journey of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, from the poor child of the Northeast to the Brazilian president for a fourth term, professor and researcher Mamour Sop Ndiaye deciphers the mechanisms of a political resurrection marked by social mobility, the defense of democracy and national sovereignty. From Brazil, he looks back on the social transformations brought about by Lula, his return to power after prison and the political, economic and geopolitical issues surrounding this new victory.

There is something dizzying in the Brazil of 2026. In a country of more than 200 million inhabitants, it still took an 80-year-old man, a former metalworker, to return to the fight to prevent the return of Bolsonarism with authoritarian and fascistic traits: nostalgia for the dictatorship, attacks against institutions, contestation of the electoral system and disinformation.

On October 25, 64,256,232 Brazilians, or 51.79% of valid votes, gave him a fourth term. To understand this victory, we must return to a trajectory that embraces the country’s fractures: hunger and social ascension, work and capital, dictatorship and democracy, dependence and sovereignty.

1. From the Nordeste to São Paulo: hunger as the first school

Lula was born in Pernambuco, in a Northeast marked by drought, poverty and internal migrations. His family leaves for São Paulo. Without wealth, without a network or a university degree, he knows small jobs, apprenticeship and then the factory.
This origin structures his political vision. Before making the fight against hunger a national priority, he had known it as a child. Before speaking about the work at the top of the State, he had experienced the hardness of it in his own body. At 17, an industrial accident caused him to lose a finger. This handicap is neither a legend nor a merit: it is an injury, the trace of a working world which will shape its way of understanding inequalities.

2. The factory, the union and democracy

Lula’s policy was formed in the factories of São Paulo, at the heart of the great strikes at the end of the dictatorship. A union leader, he organized the metalworkers, faced repression and experienced prison. He learns to build a balance of power without giving up dialogue.
He helped found the Workers’ Party and ran for president three times before winning in 2002, on his fourth attempt. The arrival to power of this former worker does not only constitute an alternation. It poses a new question at the heart of the State: who has the right to benefit from Brazilian development?

3. Make Brazil a country of all

Lula’s first two mandates profoundly changed the social structure of the country. The fight against hunger, Bolsa Família, the increase in the minimum wage, the expansion of credit, housing and consumption allow millions of families to cross poverty lines and access goods previously reserved for other social classes.
But the most lasting disruption concerns possibilities.
The Brazilian university had long reproduced the hierarchy of a society marked by nearly four centuries of slavery: it remained largely white, urban and wealthy. Lula, who never obtained a university degree, nevertheless places higher and technical education at the center of his project. Under his first two mandates, 14 federal universities and more than 200 new technical education units were created; ProUni, Reuni and the expansion of the public network greatly expand access to studies.
Children of workers become engineers, daughters of domestic workers become doctors, more young black people enter universities.

Arriving from Senegal in 1998, I was the only black student in my class; today, as a professor at a leading Brazilian university, I see many more of them in my classes. This movement obviously goes beyond Lula, but it testifies to a country that has become more socially open.
It is in this sense that Lula contributed to making Brazil a country for all: not by eliminating inequalities, but by moving the frontiers of possibility.

The country is also gaining in international stature, deepening South-South cooperation and participating in the construction of BRICS. In 2010, Dilma Rousseff succeeded him and became the country’s first female president.
It is therefore no longer just income that changes. It is the very representation of those who can study, consume, travel, access qualified professions and exercise power.

4. From prison to democratic return
Then comes the breakup.

Lula is convicted, imprisoned and prevented from participating in the 2018 election. He spends 580 days in prison. This sequence bears the hallmarks of a political exploitation of justice whose immediate effect was to exclude from the ballot the most feared adversary of the camp which would bring Jair Bolsonaro to power.
The following years reversed the story: the convictions were overturned and the Supreme Court recognized the judge’s bias in one of the proceedings.
In the meantime, the country has experienced four years of attacks on institutions, questioning of the electoral system, extreme polarization and management of the pandemic severely questioned by the Senate commission of inquiry.

Released in 2019, Lula regained his political rights in 2021. The context has radically changed: the man who had been excluded from the vote now appears to be the only leader capable of bringing together, beyond the left, a coalition large enough to defeat Bolsonaro.

In October 2022, he wins. A few weeks after his inauguration, on January 8, 2023, the seats of the three powers were invaded and ransacked in Brasília. The event confirms that the authoritarian threat was not an electoral construction.

The paradox is striking: the person we wanted out of the political game returns at the moment when the democratic system seeks recourse.
Brazil is sometimes a country of miracles.
5. Rebuild after Bolsonarism
The third mandate could not be limited to institutional recovery. It was necessary to rebuild the social, environmental and international policies weakened in previous years.
The results are measurable. Between 2023 and 2024, 8.6 million people will be lifted out of poverty. Brazil leaves the UN Hunger Map again. Bolsa Família, Minha Casa, Minha Vida and Mais Médicos are relaunched; SUS remains the basis of universal public health in a continental country.
The break is just as clear on the environment. Between August 2025 and July 2026, deforestation in the Amazon falls to 3,335 km², a drop of 41.8% in one year and the lowest level since the start of the historic series in 1988.
The country’s economic weight is also recovering. The IMF projects that Brazil, the tenth largest economy in the world in 2026, will rise to eighth place in 2027, with a GDP of around $2.8 trillion.
These figures do not resolve Brazil’s contradictions, but they indicate a change of direction: reduction of social vulnerabilities, return of public action, protection of the Amazon and international reaffirmation.
6. Trump, Big Tech and the Battle of 2026
The 2026 campaign reveals that the confrontation goes well beyond Lula and Flávio Bolsonaro.
A Reuters investigation published on the eve of the second round describes the action of US State Department officials seeking to promote the return of the Bolsonaro clan to power and supporting sanctions intended to weigh on the Brazilian political context.
The issue becomes that of sovereignty.
Brazil can dialogue with Washington, but it cannot accept that a foreign power seeks to choose its leaders.
This logic also illuminates the emphasis on BRICS, the Global South, multilateralism and a less aligned foreign policy. It also allows us to understand Lula’s freedom of tone on Palestine, even when his positions displease the great Western powers.
The battle is also being played out on digital platforms. The Higher Electoral Court demands explanations from Meta and X on possible unequal treatment of candidates and on their recommendation, advertising and artificial intelligence mechanisms. Meta denies any interference.
However, a question remains: to what extent can a democracy let a few private companies determine the visibility of political speeches?
Because social networks are no longer simple communication spaces. They structure the circulation of information, accelerate disinformation, amplify hate campaigns and can modify the very conditions in which citizens make their choices.
Two days before the election, the campaign finally reached another register when Flávio Bolsonaro made fun of Lula’s “nine fingers”.
This is not an argument.
It’s an offense.
The missing finger is the consequence of a work accident suffered at age 17. We can challenge a president on his record, his choices or his alliances. Making fun of one’s disability is personal humiliation, not democratic debate.
Forty-eight hours later, more than 64 million Brazilians choose Lula.

Lula, an idea from Brazil

This fourth victory erases neither the errors nor the contradictions of its governments. However, it gives an exceptional historical dimension to its trajectory: the child who experienced hunger becomes head of state; the trade unionist imprisoned by the dictatorship presides over the country four times; the prisoner excluded from the 2018 election returns to power.

His journey now goes beyond his person.
Lula embodies, for a considerable part of society, the idea that a modest origin should not determine a destiny, that university cannot remain a class privilege, that social mobility must be possible, that democracy must resist authoritarianism and that popular sovereignty is subordinated neither to money, nor to algorithms, nor to foreign powers.
This is where the different stages of his life finally come together: the child from the Northeast, the metalworker, the trade unionist, the president, the prisoner and the president again.
At 80 years old, Lula no longer only embodies an exceptionally long political career. It represents a certain conception of Brazil: a country which refuses that birth decides everything and which claims, inside and outside, the right to choose its own destiny.

Dr Mamour Sop Ndiaye – Teacher-researcher and head of the Department of Electrical Engineering at CEFET/RJ, Brazil. Doctor in electrical engineering, specialist in energy planning, transition and efficiency.