The former president (2003-2010) aspires to a third presidential term with the promise of repeating the social achievements among the most vulnerable classes. During his administration, some 30 million Brazilians came out of poverty, according to official data.
But this self-described “76-year-old,” who married for the third time in May, to Rosangela da Silva, a 55-year-old sociologist, is coming back from far below.
Former Brazilian President Lula da Silva wants to be a presidential candidate
Who is Lula da Silva?
Lula, whom former US President Barack Obama (2009-2017) described years ago as “The Man”, added personal tragedies to his political and judicial setbacks since the death of his second wife, Marisa Leticia, in February 2017.
Already imprisoned, he lost a brother and a seven-year-old grandson. Before, in 2011, he suffered from laryngeal cancer.
But he managed to overcome everything, as he did since he was born in the poor and arid Brazilian northeast.
The seventh son of an illiterate couple from the northeast, he was abandoned by his father before the family emigrated to the industrialized metropolis of Sao Paulo, like millions of countrymen.
He was a street vendor and shoeshine boy. At the age of 15, he began his training as a lathe operator, lost a little finger while manipulating a machine, and at the end of the 1970s, as head of the metalworkers’ union, he led a historic strike that challenged the military dictatorship (1964-1985).