Lula Won Again at 80, But Who Exactly Is the Man Who Has Been Running for President of Brazil Since 1989?

Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has lived one of the most improbable political lives in the history of Latin America, and on Sunday he added another chapter to it. The 80-year-old Workers’ Party president was reelected to a fourth term leading Brazil’s Palácio do Planalto, defeating Senator Flávio Bolsonaro of the Liberal Party and pulling off a historic reversal after finishing behind him in the first round of voting. It was Lula’s seventh presidential run and his second reelection, a record that would be extraordinary for any politician and is particularly striking for a man who spent 580 days in prison before having every conviction against him annulled.

A Life Built on Labor, Politics and Survival

Lula was born in Caetés, a small municipality in the northeastern state of Pernambuco, the seventh of eight children in a family that migrated to São Paulo when he was seven years old. At fifteen he completed a technical course to become a mechanical lathe operator, a trade that put him in direct contact with the labor movement that would define his early political identity. He became a union organizer and was one of the founders of the Workers’ Party, known as the PT, in 1980, building a political base from the factory floor up at a time when Brazil was still emerging from military dictatorship.

He was elected to the federal Chamber of Deputies in 1986 and participated in the National Constituent Assembly of 1987, the body that drafted Brazil’s current democratic constitution. His first presidential run came in 1989, when he lost in the second round to Fernando Collor de Mello. He ran again in 1994 and 1998, losing both times to Fernando Henrique Cardoso, who won in the first round on each occasion. The losses did not push him out of the race. They kept him in it.

Three Terms, a Prison Cell and a Return to Power

Lula finally reached the presidency in 2002, defeating José Serra of the PSDB party in the second round, and he won reelection in 2006 against his current vice president Geraldo Alckmin, who was running under the PSDB banner at the time. He engineered the 2010 election of his successor Dilma Rousseff, also of the Workers’ Party, and left office that year with approval ratings that were among the highest in Brazilian presidential history.

The fall came after he left power. In 2018 Lula was convicted of passive corruption and money laundering in connection with a beachfront apartment in the coastal city of Guarujá, and then convicted again in 2019 in a separate case involving a rural property in Atibaia. Brazil’s Superior Electoral Court barred his 2018 presidential candidacy under the country’s Clean Record Law. He spent 580 days in detention before the Supreme Federal Tribunal annulled all convictions against him in April 2021, restoring his political eligibility.

In 2022 he returned to the ballot and defeated former President Jair Bolsonaro in the second round, claiming his third term. Sunday’s victory against Flávio Bolsonaro, the former president’s son and now a senator from the Liberal Party, gives him a fourth, making him the most elected president in Brazil’s modern democratic history and one of the most durable political figures the region has produced.

What His Reelection Means for the Amazon and the Communities Who Live Inside It

The results of Lula’s third term on the Amazon have been measurable. Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon fell 41.8 percent between August 2025 and July 2026, reaching its lowest level since records began in 1988, according to Al Jazeera. Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research reported that forest clearing in the first half of 2026 alone dropped 38 percent compared to the same period the previous year. Lula relaunched a national anti-deforestation action plan, increased penalties for environmental crimes and has pledged to end illegal deforestation entirely by 2030. The numbers represent a direct reversal of what happened under his predecessor, whose administration saw deforestation peak around 2022.

For indigenous communities across the Amazon basin, the reelection carries a specific and urgent meaning. Flávio Bolsonaro had campaigned on promises to halt indigenous land demarcation, a policy position that would have opened territories to mining and agricultural expansion. Lula’s victory blocks that agenda for now, but Amazon Watch warned on Sunday that indigenous protections remain fragile. Alessandra Korap Munduruku, a prominent indigenous leader, said in the hours after the result that “our territories are far from safe,” pointing to a Congress where the far-right Liberal Party now holds the most seats in both chambers. Several incoming state governors in Rondônia and Roraima have also signaled support for expanding mining inside indigenous territories, which means the legislative environment surrounding Lula’s fourth term will be considerably more hostile to environmental protection than his electoral win alone suggests.

Infrastructure projects including the proposed Ferrogrão railway and expanded river shipping routes continue to generate conflict over their social and environmental consequences for communities that depend on the forest for their survival. The Supreme Court reinstated the suspension of Belo Sun’s gold mine permit in the Volta Grande do Xingu region, a decision that indigenous and environmental advocates had fought for years to secure, and that fight will continue regardless of the political calendar.

The Man From Pernambuco, Still Standing

Lula entered his first presidential race in 1989 as a union organizer from the northeast of Brazil who had never held national office, lost, came back, lost twice more, won, won again, left, went to prison, had his convictions annulled, won a third time and has now won a fourth. He did all of this across nearly four decades of Brazilian democratic life, through economic crises, corruption scandals, the rise and fall of political movements and the election of his own successor. At 80, running against the son of the man he defeated four years ago, he won again. Brazil now enters a fourth Lula administration led by a man whose entire political biography reads as proof that the story is never over until he decides it is.