SÃO PAULO—President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is 80 years old, recovered from brain surgery and convinced that Brazil’s left can’t survive without him.
Da Silva is expected to go through to a runoff with Bolsonaro, but if he loses that race, the country’s left could be shut out of power for years, making it another Latin American political movement that fails to outlive its founders. Da Silva’s dominance has proved both the Workers’ Party’s greatest asset and its ultimate weakness. As Brazil’s first working-class president, his personal bond with poorer voters transcends his party’s brand.
Sunday’s election—a razor-thin race against Flávio Bolsonaro, a 45-year-old senator and son of former President Jair Bolsonaro—serves as a test of that wager.
Another term would let da Silva manage the transition from the presidency, but out of power, without the influence and machinery of government, the struggle to find the left’s next torchbearer is set to be far more difficult, Gabiati said. “The poor always get screwed here but Lula screwed us a bit less,” said Pedro Alves, a construction worker in São Paulo, who said he had managed to put his son into college thanks to a government-backed student loan program expanded under the Workers’ Party.
“Anyone you put next to him looks tiny by comparison.
“Lula is perhaps the most important political leader of the century,” said João Paulo Rodrigues, leader of the Landless Workers’ Movement. Rodrigues said he would consider running for president one day, but that there was little point in contemplating a post-Lula future before that moment actually arrived. Jokingly citing Karl Marx, he said: “Mankind always sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve. But with da Silva’s defeat in a likely runoff now a real possibility and new figures fast emerging on the political right, the search for a political heir is more urgent than ever, said Leandro Gabiati, a political scientist and director at Dominium Public Affairs.
