A Review of Lula: A People’s President and the Fight for Brazil’s Future

Lula: A People’s President and the Fight for Brazil’s Future by André Pagliarini (Polity, 2025, 240 pages)

André Pagliarini’s new book arrives at a timely moment. During the summer of 2025, when the book was released, the United States began engaging in deeper debates about Brazil’s political situation. This shift was tied to the U.S. government’s decision to impose 50% tariffs on Brazilian products—the highest level ever applied to another country, matched only by India. In a letter to President Lula, Donald Trump’s administration justified the measure by citing a trade deficit with Brazil. It also criticized the South American nation for prosecuting one of Washington’s ideological allies, former president Jair Bolsonaro, on charges of attempting a coup d’état. Sentenced by Brazil’s Supreme Court to just over 27 years in prison, the right-wing leader had lost his 2022 reelection bid to a well-known leftist figure, Lula da Silva, and now stands, for many, as a global example of how a democracy can respond to those who attack it and attempt to cling to power through force.

Another factor that elevated Brazil to the role of a central actor in the new global dynamic between isolationist tendencies and calls for multilateralism was President Lula’s response to the attacks coming from the Trump administration. Combined with Brazil’s long-standing tradition of defending the sovereignty of its institutions—a stance shaped by the memory of U.S. support for the establishment of Brazil’s military regime (1964–1985)—the Brazilian head of state now positions himself as one of the leading voices of the Global South advocating for an independent foreign policy. This has meant distancing Brazil from the United States on nearly every issue or conflict, from Lula’s sharp criticism of the Israeli government to his proposal for external mediation in the Russia–Ukraine war, without explicitly siding with either party.

The work of Pagliarini, an Assistant Professor of History at Louisiana State University, is not the first in English about the Brazilian leader, who is now serving his third term as president, having previously been elected in 2002 and 2006. Lula left office with an approval rating close to 90 percent and successfully paved the way for the election of his successor from the same party, Dilma Rousseff. In 2020, during Jair Bolsonaro’s presidency, John French published Lula and His Politics of Cunning, which reflects the Duke historian’s expertise with a deep exploration of Lula’s beginnings as a metalworker and union leader under the military dictatorship. French also traces the layers of Lula’s biography that led him to challenge Brazil’s authoritarian and conservative political structures, become the country’s first leftist president, and build an administration that drew support not only from the left but also from centrists and even segments of the right in Congress.

More recently, in 2024, the translation and updated edition of Lula: A Biography, originally written in Portuguese by journalist Fernando Morais, brought another significant English-language contribution. For that book, Lula himself gave a series of interviews. It is worth noting, however, that Morais’s work was written by a Brazilian author primarily for a Brazilian readership, which brings with it the need for more detailed—and at times even didactic—explanations of the country’s internal dynamics. Both French and Morais, however, share a temporal limitation: their narratives cover Lula’s first two presidential terms, his imprisonment on corruption charges, the judicial ban that prevented him from running in 2018, and his release the following year. What follows is left unaddressed: the Bolsonaro years in Brasília, the deepening of political polarization, the Covid-19 pandemic, and Lula’s victory over Bolsonaro in the 2022 election.

In this context, Pagliarini’s book is a fundamental contribution to understanding both contemporary Brazil and the figure of Lula himself. As a Brazilian American historian, he brings to the project a special background, having frequently written about Brazil for audiences outside the country in major journalistic outlets. This rare quality makes his book accessible not only to scholars unfamiliar with the subject, but also to journalists, policymakers and general readers with an interest in Brazil. When explaining the purpose and goals of his work, Pagliarini emphasizes that his objective is to give readers “a concise, accessible understanding of modern Brazilian political history through the critically important character of Lula and to understand Lula more fully by situating him within his country’s larger twentieth-century story” (p. 9).

Unlike the traditional structure of works produced by historians, the author chooses to organize his book into seven chapters that span a broad period of Brazilian history, covering the years from 1917 to 2025. While one might criticize this approach as overly succinct given the treatment of multiple decades, this reviewer considers Pagliarini’s choice appropriate to the book’s purpose: explaining Brazil’s political and social dynamics to a foreign audience not necessarily specialized in the subject. The opening chapter begins with a description of the 1917 general strike in São Paulo during World War I, a watershed moment in the political awakening of Brazil’s industrial workers. This politicization was partly fueled by the ideas and organizational principles brought to the country by Italian and Spanish workers who had immigrated to Brazil in search of better living conditions from the second half of the 19th century onward. It was from this politicized labor movement, in fact, that Lula would later emerge.

In the early 1960s, the young Luiz Inácio was enrolled by his mother in a metalworker training program at the National Service for Industrial Training (SENAI), an institution created during President Getúlio Vargas’s first administration (1930–1945). Vargas himself, along with several other key figures, is introduced in this chapter as a head of state closely tied to labor organizations, whose policies visibly improved the situation of the working class and fostered the development of national industry. Readers eager to delve directly into the early years of Lula’s life may be frustrated to find that the book first explores pages detailing not only the 1917 strike, but also the rise of Brazil’s communist parties, the Vargas years, the administrations of presidents Gaspar Dutra, Juscelino Kubitschek and João Goulart, as well as the military regime established in 1964. The chapter concludes with Lula already immersed in the labor movement, encouraged by one of his brothers, elected president of the Metalworkers’ Union of São Bernardo do Campo and Diadema in 1975, and leading a major strike of factory workers in São Paulo in 1978 that propelled him to national prominence.

The following chapters continue with the same approach established by Pagliarini. Lula’s trajectory is used as a thread through which the book revisits key themes of modern Brazilian history. Chapter 2, for example, focuses on the founding of the Workers’ Party (PT), which Lula both created and led, while Chapter 3 explores his role in the 1988 Constituent Assembly—the first since the end of the military dictatorship four years earlier—as well as his defeats in the presidential elections of 1989 to Fernando Collor de Mello and in 1994 and 1998 to Fernando Henrique Cardoso. Here, Pagliarini’s skill in writing about Brazil for a foreign audience, particularly a U.S. one, becomes evident. In noting the possibility that Lula may run for a fourth presidential term in 2026, he underscores that—if successful—the Brazilian president would match the feat of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who won four U.S. presidential elections. Perhaps the most striking of these cross-cultural connections is his comparison between Marisa Letícia, Lula’s second wife, and Betsy Ross. In the early years after the Workers’ Party was founded, he writes, the future First Lady became increasingly engaged in the life of the PT, “including as a foundational Betsy Ross figure—she was responsible for the creation of the party’s first banner, with the stark red star set against a white backdrop” (p. 53).

The fourth chapter examines the 2002 presidential election, highlighting both the shifts and the continuities during Lula’s first two administrations, and concludes with the 2010 election of his chosen successor, Dilma Rousseff. The following chapter turns to Rousseff’s presidency, marked by what the author describes as “the agonies of incumbency,” which culminated in her controversial removal from office through impeachment in 2016. The narrative then moves to the ascent of the radical right, represented most prominently by Jair Bolsonaro, under whose leadership Brazil experienced increasing international isolation. The final chapter brings the story into the present, reflecting on the initial phase of Lula’s third term and considering what lies ahead for the future of Brazilian democracy.

For anyone seeking to understand contemporary Brazil and how the country has come to be regarded as an emerging leader in the Global South, André Pagliarini’s book is essential reading. It provides a clear overview of the major events that have shaped the nation’s political landscape from the early 20th century up through the beginning of Lula’s third term in 2023. The author’s ambition to produce not only a biography of the president but, more importantly, a modern political history of Brazil also brings certain limitations. The book does not examine in depth Lula’s involvement in pivotal episodes such as the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff in 2016, and it devotes only a few paragraphs to his imprisonment on corruption and money laundering charges between 2018 and 2019—an episode that would undoubtedly draw the attention of both Brazilian and international readers.

By the time the narrative turns to the rise of right-wing leader Jair Bolsonaro in its final chapters, the impression given at the book’s outset is reaffirmed. Readers approaching this work with the expectation of immersing themselves in Lula’s personal life and political trajectory will instead encounter broader reflections on Brazil’s political context, not always centered on the president himself. This naturally raises questions about the choice of title, which appears to function largely as an editorial hook. Rather than relying on the attention-grabbing use of “Lula” on the cover, it would have been more fitting to adopt a title that more accurately reflects the book’s content.

Lucas de Souza Martins is a Doctoral Fellow in History at Temple University specializing in U.S.–Latin America relations. He has taught at Temple University and Villanova University and held research fellowships with The Carter Center and the Wilson Center.

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