By Walter Brandimarte Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva climbed the ramp of Brazil’s presidential palace on the first day of 2023 to begin his third term. His defeated predecessor, Jair Bolsonaro, had left for Florida rather than attend the inauguration, so a group of ordinary Brazilians joined Lula in Brasília to place the presidential sash over his shoulder — a carefully staged image of democratic renewal.

A week later, the monumental square in front of the palace became the backdrop for a very different spectacle. A crowd draped in Brazil’s green and yellow stormed Congress, the Supreme Court and the presidential palace, smashing windows and furniture and slashing paintings. The rioters hoped the chaos would prompt the military to overturn the election and return Bolsonaro to power.

The two scenes captured the opposing forces that have defined Brazilian politics for years. Now, as the country heads toward another presidential election, it is struggling with a paradox neither side has managed to resolve. Lula, 80, is seeking a fourth term, 16 years after he first left office; Bolsonaro is in prison, but his eldest son, Flávio, is running in his place. After years of elections, scandals, convictions and political comebacks, Brazil still hasn’t figured out how to leave the age of Lula and Bolsonaro behind. Nor is it clear whether Lula’s left and Bolsonaro’s right can outlive the men who made them.

Twelve years before his return to the presidential palace, Lula had left it looking like the founder of a political era. After two terms and eight years, his approval ratings were above 80%. In 2010 the economy expanded 7.5%, and Brazil had paid off its debt to the International Monetary Fund and weathered the global economic crisis better than many richer countries. Rising wages, combined with Bolsa Família, Lula’s flagship program providing cash payments to low-income families, had drawn millions into the consumer economy, helping expand a new middle class that was buying refrigerators, cars and plane tickets.

Lula also appeared to have solved the oldest problem of political succession: how to choose an heir without creating a rival. In Dilma Rousseff, his former mines and energy minister and chief of staff, he had found a successor who could carry on his political project without threatening his place at its center.

Dilma, as Brazilians knew her, had never run for elected office. Inside Lula’s government, she was known for technical rigor, a formidable temper and little tolerance for excuses. Crucially, she commanded no powerful faction of her own, offering an answer to the rivalries among his would-be heirs. He could hand her the presidency without handing over his movement.

But the traits that had made Dilma formidable inside an administration proved less useful in the disorderly business of governing Brazil. Toughness became inflexibility. Her command of policy could not replicate Lula’s gift for bargaining with Congress, managing rival factions and making unlikely coalitions work.

Then the conditions that had eased the transition began to vanish. Growth slowed, mass protests erupted in 2013, and Dilma scraped through reelection the following year. At the same time, Operation Carwash was exposing a sprawling kickback scheme involving state oil company Petrobras, major construction firms and politicians across the party system. The investigation engulfed Lula, who was accused of receiving benefits from construction companies in exchange for helping them secure government contracts. Economic malaise fed public anger over corruption, and the corruption scandal deepened the political crisis.

By 2016, Brazil was in recession and Dilma’s coalition was deserting her. Congress impeached her for breaking budget rules, and Vice President Michel Temer took over for the remainder of her term. Whether her removal is remembered as constitutional accountability or condemned as a parliamentary coup, it exposed the weakness in Lula’s succession plan: Without prosperity — and without Lula’s own talent for coalition-building — his chosen heir could not hold the project together.

Soon the crisis caught up with Lula himself. He was convicted of corruption and money laundering in 2017, and in April 2018 the Supreme Court rejected his request to remain free while he appealed, clearing the way for him to begin serving his sentence. With Lula imprisoned and barred from the ballot, Bolsonaro won the presidency that October.

Jair Bolsonaro had spent nearly three decades on the back benches of Congress and might well have remained there. A former army captain known less for legislative accomplishments than for provocation, he had long occupied the margins of national politics. But as corruption scandals engulfed Lula, the Workers’ Party and much of Brazil’s political establishment, the qualities that had made Bolsonaro easy to dismiss began to look different to millions of angry voters: Bluntness became authenticity, provocation became defiance.

Carwash supplied the anger. Social media supplied the megaphone. Bolsonaro no longer needed a large party organization to become a national figure, and a political system discredited by scandal suddenly had an appetite for someone who claimed to stand outside it. The moment was searching for an anti-Lula, and there he was.

His supporters called him Mito — the Myth — and his political identity was constructed in opposition to Lula, the Workers’ Party and an establishment his followers believed had been shielded from accountability. But the relationship worked both ways. Lula and Bolsonaro became opposing magnets, each organizing the country’s fear of the other. Bolsonaro’s rise reinforced Lula’s importance to the left; Lula’s return gave Bolsonaro’s movement the adversary it needed. Even defeat renewed them.

Yet their succession problems were fundamentally different. The Workers’ Party had been built as precisely the kind of institution that ought to outlive its founder: a mass organization rooted in unions, social movements, local chapters and internal debate. Its inability to produce a durable post-Lula leadership is therefore all the more striking. Bolsonarismo made fewer such pretenses. Bolsonaro changed parties repeatedly; his family was the durable organization. Where Lula tried to manufacture a political heir, Bolsonaro raised biological ones.

The Supreme Court that helped clear the way for Lula’s imprisonment would soon help reopen his path to power. In 2019 it reversed the rule allowing defendants to be imprisoned before their appeals were exhausted, leading to Lula’s release after 580 days behind bars. Two years later, the court annulled his convictions after finding that the cases had been tried in the wrong jurisdiction, restoring his political rights and allowing him to run again.

After Lula’s return and the Jan. 8 invasion of Brasília — in which rioters stormed and vandalized the Supreme Court itself — the court entered the fray once again. It tried and convicted rioters, oversaw the investigation into the attempted coup and ultimately convicted Bolsonaro of trying to overturn the 2022 election. The cases against the two men were very different, but they produced an inescapable symmetry: Lula was imprisoned while Bolsonaro governed; Bolsonaro was imprisoned while Lula governed. Neither man’s imprisonment loosened his hold over his movement.

Neither movement, in other words, has managed to escape its founder. Lula’s answer to failed succession has been to run again. Bolsonaro, barred from running himself, has turned succession into inheritance.

Flávio’s campaign offers a vivid illustration of that inheritance. He helped negotiate a financing package worth about 134 million reais ($26 million) for , a troubled biopic intended to turn his father’s political life into cinema. The money came from Daniel Vorcaro, the former Banco Master owner at the center of a sprawling fraud investigation. Flávio denies receiving any personal benefit or offering favors in exchange, but the relationship has ensured that a film intended to burnish his father’s legacy has instead become part of the scandal shadowing his own campaign.

The metaphor is almost too exact. As Flávio campaigns to inherit his father’s movement, he is under investigation over the financing of a movie designed to transform that father into legend. Political succession and the manufacture of political mythology have become entangled in the same enterprise.

Banco Master carries an echo of Carwash. The scandals differ in origin, mechanics and scale, but both spread through Brasília by exposing relationships that crossed ordinary political boundaries. Master’s web has reached left and right, Congress and the courts, leaving Supreme Court justices themselves caught in the fallout. The institution that emerged from Jan. 8 as democracy’s most forceful defender now faces questions about its own credibility. More consequentially, the scandal has disrupted the court’s place in Brazil’s familiar polarization: The left has reasons to distrust one set of justices, the right another. For once, the court is under fire from both sides.

For all the upheaval of the past 16 years — impeachment, imprisonment, scandal, political resurrection and an assault on the institutions of democracy — Brazil has proved remarkably unable to move beyond the two figures who came to define its politics. Lula built a party meant to outlast him, only to find himself indispensable to it. Bolsonaro built a movement around himself and his family, ensuring that even his absence would leave another Bolsonaro in his place. The names on the ballot may change. The age of Lula and Bolsonaro has yet to end.