‘Bolsonaro doesn’t know the Earth is round’: how Lula can win back Brazil | Andre Pagliarini

The mishandling of the pandemic has only strengthened the former president's standing - and now he's free to run again

On Wednesday 10 March, Brazil's former president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva gave a rousing comeback speech at the metalworkers' union headquarters in Sao Bernardo do Campo, an industrial centre in the Sao Paulo metropolitan region from where Lula first emerged as a national figure in the 1970s. The day before, in a shocking turnaround that surprised even those convinced of his innocence, a justice on the supreme court annulled the criminal convictions against Lula, rendering him eligible to run for a third term next year.

The ruling in Lula's favour would have been a major story even if his popularity had faded since leaving office in 2011. But recent polls show that he remains strikingly electable, ahead of the far-right incumbent, Jair Bolsonaro, who won the 2018 election. Other polls suggest a closer race, which is still notable given that Lula has not even started campaigning. Lula also led in the polls three years ago but was barred from running by an infamous judge who went on to join the Bolsonaro administration. For his part, Bolsonaro, a retired army captain who served without distinction in congress for 27 years, has presided over an unmitigated catastrophe. If Latin America's largest nation was once held up as a model for how to balance economic growth with dramatic poverty reduction, its current leadership seems perfectly content with being a global pariah (the foreign minister literally said as much last October).