In 2018, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was about to turn himself in to prison, after a trial his supporters saw as a politically motivated witch hunt launched by conservatives who feared his power at the ballot box.

“It’s no use trying to stop me from traveling around this country, because there are millions of Lulas,” he told a crowd outside the metalworkers’ union in the industrial city of Sāo Bernardo, where he had camped out to avoid arrest. The 72-year-old former president was dressed in a simple blue T-shirt, his wispy hair tousled.

“There’s no point in thinking that everything’s going to stop the day Lula has a heart attack,” he continued.

“That’s nonsense.”By then, Lula was an icon as much as he was a retired head of state, the brain behind far-reaching social programs that had lifted swathes of the population out of poverty and facilitated access to education. During Lula’s second term, in 2009, then-President Barack Obama called him “the most popular politician on Earth.”Even while in prison on charges he contested, Lula began plotting a return to office. Nineteen months later, the charges were overturned and Lula was released, ready to go after his new foil: far-right firebrand Jair Bolsonaro, whose uncouth populism and handling of the Covid-19 pandemic had shocked Brazil’s political and business establishment.

To win, Lula had to look beyond the traditional base of the Workers’ Party (known by its Brazilian initials as the PT) he had helped to establish in 1980, the dying days of Brazil’s military dictatorship. In a deft political maneuver, he picked a former rival from the center-right as his running mate, reassuring corporate leaders and capturing a powerful block of centrist parties in Congress.

Today, the world’s most successful left-of-center politician of the 21st century will appear on a presidential ballot again, for one last time. Lula now faces Flávio Bolsonaro, Jair’s son, in the second round of what is turning out to be the tightest presidential election in Brazil’s modern history, as he has struggled to update his old story to new times.

Win or lose, Brazil’s left is quietly preparing to navigate its post-Lula era with what many in his entourage privately confess is overwhelming uncertainty about what is to come. Either Lula will eek out one last victory and head into a lame-duck term in which now peaceful factions will fight to succeed him, or he will retreat from the scene in embarrassing defeat — one more left-wing leader brushed aside amid a right-wing wave sweeping the hemisphere.

“In either of the scenarios, the left faces the difficult task of reorganizing itself and the entire progressive political field,” said a person close to the campaign of a prominent PT politician. He was granted anonymity to candidly assess a future many consider taboo to discuss.

Looking on with self-interested curiosity are left-of-center politicians around the world — including those now governing in London, Paris, Madrid and Ottawa — who have watched Lula deftly maneuver the global financial crisis and pandemic, the rise of the post-materialist identity-driven left and populist-nationalist right. Now they are all waiting to see whether it was just Lula’s unique history and charisma that held together the broad coalition they envied.

“Lula is bigger than the PT, bigger than the left,” said pollster Mauricio Moura, who has worked for candidates across Brazil’s political spectrum. “What the post-Lula left will look like is a big incognito.”After the polls closed in the first round of voting three weeks ago, a Brazilian American political operative joined a watch party at the São Paulo headquarters of Marina Silva, a Lula ally serving in his Cabinet. The set-up was festive: There was a big screen and a table with soda and typical Brazilian savory snacks, and .

The food sat mostly untouched as people stared at the screen, registering that voters who had banded around Lula as a source of stability four years earlier had this time abandoned him. People worried about high costs, crime and corruption were not charmed by an avuncular authority figure speaking in lofty terms about saving democracy while an underestimated adversary made a straight-shooting appeal to their anger.

At the watch party, blank stares turned to tears. To Fernando Brigidi, it all felt familiar.

“I’ve seen this film before: an 80-year-old incumbent who leans on the politics of nostalgia, looks to the past and hasn’t adapted to a new political reality,” said Brigidi, who had worked in former President Joe Biden’s White House before joining Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign in 2024.

Lula’s election in 2022, like Biden’s two years earlier, had been the result of a meandering path to the presidency filled with personal tragedy, false starts, failed candidacies and mercurial ideology.

Born into a poor family in Brazil’s northeastern Pernambuco, Lula went hungry as a child. And as a metalworker, he lost one of his fingers in an industrial accident, leaving lasting evidence of the precariousness of working-class life. After years in the trade union movement, in 1980 Lula co-founded the Workers’ Party, which became the country’s dominant left-wing institution as Brazil emerged from decades of dictatorship.

“Part of the reason Lula is so singular is that he represents the confluence of all of these different strands of 20th century political history,” says Andre Pagliarini, a historian and Lula biographer. “He’s the one figure who's capable of unifying the remnants of that Catholic progressive tradition that is now aging, intellectuals, the left-wing activists in the street, the people from the favelas and the poor neighborhoods and the peripheries of the major cities.”During three non-consecutive terms, starting in 2002, Lula has nimbly adjusted to changes in Brazil’s economy and its place in the world, using a spike in commodity prices to finance new social programs even as he made concessions to the right.

“There are very few people in Brazilian politics, or politics more generally, who can go back and forth along the ideological spectrum and remain so dominant for so many years, without being accused of being a sell-out,” said Oliver Stuenkel, a German Brazilian political analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

The radical language Lula tended to use in opposition, around issues like Indigenous rights and organized labor, tended to give way to pragmatism during presidential runs and while in office. In 2002, after enacting a constitutional amendment to control a costly and dysfunctional pension system, the Workers Party expelled a cadre of leftist members for protesting the measure, freeing them to start a rival Socialism and Liberty Party to Lula’s left. Last year, when following through on a promise to give low-income households a tax exemption, Lula simultaneously introduced a plan to cut spending.

“A union leader has to have the courage to make proposals and negotiate, but also to make decisions that aren’t always the all-or-nothing position they advocated," Lula said in a June 2024 speech to striking university employees.

Along the way, Lula astutely managed potential rivals to both his right and left. In 2014, when Silva, a progressive environmental activist, came up in the polls ahead of the presidential election, the PT “came after her and destroyed her,” said Stuenkel, including accusations she was a neoliberal and posed a threat to democracy. As a consequence, Silva’s campaign collapsed.

A few years later, Lula appointed Silva as environment minister, part of a concerted effort to elevate Afro-Brazilian and female candidates within his coalition(He also created Brazil’s first-ever Ministry of Indigenous Peoples.) Over the years, Lula has repeated versions of that same maneuver: bringing rivals into his government and neutralizing them as he expanded his coalition. In 2022, he chose as his running mate Geraldo Alckmin, of the center-right Social Democrat Party, whom he had defeated in the 2006 runoff but now helped him reassure centrist elites and calm investors.

Last year, he handed a prominent ministerial post to the most visible politician to emerge from the Socialism and Liberty Party that spun off from the PT nearly a quarter-century ago. Guilherme Boulos first gained recognition leading a homeless workers movement to occupy a large tract of land owned by Volkswagen; now he heads the secretariat of the president.

But the country was gradually growing away from Lula even as he loomed over it. In large part thanks to Lula’s own policies, Brazil now has a bigger middle class than ever before and an army of gig workers. Rather than feel protected by Lula’s idea of the welfare state, they feel hamstrung by it. Meanwhile, a booming agro-tourism sector and Evangelical Church have bolstered a conservative identity that is less bossa nova and more cowboy. Lula paid little deference to the socioeconomic and cultural shift: At a rally in September, he said farmers should “kneel” before him for what he had done for them.

“As long as Lula remains on the stage for better or for worse, the PT is not engaging quite yet with the world that is coming,” said Pagliarini. “It is still litigating the world that it came from.”One week after the first round of voting this month, and with two weeks left before the second, the center of São Paulo turned bright red, with Lula supporters wearing his party’s colors filling up every nook and cranny of Avenida Paulista, the city’s main thoroughfare. They chanted “olé, olé, olá, Lula," and formed an L with their fingers, a widely recognized shorthand for the president.

The rally, part of a series of March for Democracy events held across the country, was not centrally organized by the PT but independently by social movements. They were joined by student associations, LGBTQ+ activists, soccer clubs’ supporter groups and fan clubs such as the Taylor Swifties. Their joint ability to mobilize for Lula made it one of the largest political gatherings that Brazil has seen over the last decade (even if short of Lula’s boast of one million attendees).

The cast of politicians present on Avenida Paulista was a testament to the big tent Lula had built over decades. Former rivals who now served in his government, like Silva to his left and Alckmin to his right, both spoke. Fernando Haddad, an academic turned career politician who took Lula’s place on the ballot during his prison term, and Boulos, the one-time leader of the squatters movement, both waded through the crowd, their moves captured for Instagram reels.

But despite the enthusiastic show of force in the business district of Brazil’s wealthiest city, the national coalition that had put Lula in office was crumbling. In the first round of voting this month, he tallied 3.4 million fewer votes than he did during the first round in 2022. Lower and middle-income Brazilians had chosen Bolsonaro by a wide margin. Even in the Northeast, Lula’s home region where poverty has traditionally made the electorate dependent on PT largesse, his vote share shrank. More voters abstained from casting a ballot than in any election since 1998. “It was an anti-incumbent election against a government that more than half the country disapproves of,” said Moura, the pollster.

Lula built a party that Pagliarini calls “too big to fail,” but those in his entourage admit that he may have made himself a little too indispensable.

He generated no shortage of allies and protégés but prepared no successor and, according to uncomfortable admissions by some within his entourage, even got in the way. Some who might have been primed to emerge — like 32-year-old former Recife Mayor João Campos — lost races for higher office this month, denying them the opportunity to develop national profiles before the next presidential election in 2030. A centrist bloc that had allied with Lula lost ground in Congress.

It would be hard for any fight for post-Lula leadership of the PT to avoid becoming a zero-sum contest among factions that Lula kept at peace with one another. If the PT moves appreciably to its left ahead of 2030, in the direction of party ideologues like lawmaker Gleisi Hoffmann, it would alienate centrist voters. If a more pro-business candidate like Haddad emerges, parties like the Socialism and Liberty Party that had fallen under Lula’s sway would likely split.

“I want to reaffirm that his successor will not be a name; it will be the Workers' Party,” PT president Edinho Silva said in a speech in 2025. “Because another Lula will not be born.”

If Lula loses today, it will unleash a blame game about why he didn’t groom a successor or stage an open primary, much like in the U.S. after Biden, Brigidi predicted. But he said, in the best case, it might also spark a debate on a question progressives are facing around the world: “How did this group of people who believed that they represented the working class suddenly become seen as elitist and disconnected from the economic anxiety of the lower and middle class?”

That is a global concern for a left that in recent years has struggled to hold power at a moment of intense fury toward traditional institutions. In many cases, their historical achievement — helping to build a broad consensus beyond their working-class base — has now made them a natural object of distrust. It was much as had happened with Biden and Harris in 2024, and appears to be occurring now in Germany, France and Spain, where the left and centrists are losing voters who have come to see them as detached from people’s everyday concerns.

“Voters don't want more of the same. Voters want something new,” Brigidi said. “They never offered a new future, a new vision for the future.”Lula, who actively cultivated relationships with likeminded parties worldwide, has watched many of his Latin American neighbors turn right in recent years. Politicians who have long studied Lula’s political and policy successes are now primed to learn from his failure.

“We'll draw the lessons from our comrades and critically analyze what needs to be learned and how to stay in touch with the people and their concerns while in power," Hadrien Clouet, a parliamentarian with the left-wing France Unbowed party who co-authored its presidential candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon's platform.

Spanish left-wing Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez endorsed Lula last week, saying that “Brazil deserves to continue moving toward a future of hope and progress” — similar language to what he is likely to tell voters as he faces his own tough reelection next month against an insurgent populist right.

“For us, the PSOE, it’s very, very important that a party like the PT, that we consider a sister party, wins these elections,” said Hana Jalloul Muro, secretary on international politics and cooperation at the Spanish ruling party she identified by its Spanish-language initials. “We need more progressive governments in Latin America. [Lula] is a leading voice in Latin America and around the world as well, along with [President] Claudia Sheinbaum in Mexico and [President] Yamandú Orsi in Uruguay.”

On the day of the mass demonstration in downtown São Paulo, a combative Lula, weeks away from turning 81, once again addressed a crowd urging supporters in a growly voice to help convince the more than 30 million people who’d skipped the first round to vote for him in the run-off. “Either you participate in political life, or it cannot be fixed,” he said from a sound truck.

One of those who had abstained already got the message. Paulo Oliveira, a 60-year-old sales manager in the residential São Paulo neighborhood of Perdizes, had cast a blank vote in the first round. “The left has missed the train of history. No one gives a shit about trade unions anymore,” he said.

In the second round, he was ready to do what it took to keep Bolsonaro — “the devil,” according to Oliveira — from coming to power. But he would be picking a side only reluctantly, blaming Lula for years of stagnation and the personification of politics.

“He’s become the new Stalin. It’s all become personal,” said Oliveira. “If Lula dies, nobody knows who to vote for.”