COMMENTARY Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is 80 and running for re-election, an egotistical move that may open the door to another reactionary Bolsonaro presidency — this time the son's.
Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s name has always been a mouthful. But I think we can shorten it up now and just call Lula what he’s running the real risk of becoming:
The Biden of Brazil.
Last week, Lula left no doubt he’s gunning for re-election when he announced that his vice president, Geraldo Alckmin, will again be his running mate in the October presidential contest.
The main candidate the liberal Lula will face is right-wing Senator Flávio Bolsonaro — the 44-year-old son of right-wing former President Jair Bolsonaro.
But, you might say, that shouldn’t be a problem for Lula. After all, Jair Bolsonaro and his reactionary brand are in disgrace because he was convicted last year of leading a coup attempt after he lost his re-election bid to Lula in 2022. Right?
Apparently not.
READ MORE: In America, like Latin America, is gerontocracy a 'recipe for disaster'?
A new AtlasIntel poll shows that while Flávio Bolsonaro was garnering just 23% of voters’ preference to Lula’s 47% back in November, he’s now catapulted to more than 40% against Lula’s 46%. What’s more, the same poll indicates that if the two were to go head-to-head in a run-off election, Flávio Bolsonaro would win.
How, you might ask, can that be? Is it due to Brazil’s slowing growth and rising inflation?
I’ll venture that it’s not so much the economy, stupid, as it is the age.
Lula is 80. He’ll be 81 in October.
And polls for months now have warned that Brazilian voters, as much as 70% in some surveys, worry that Lula is velho demais — too damn old.
Oh, you might complain, I’m just being ageist.
Spare me. I’m being empirical — and anyone who watched the Democrats’ 2024 presidential election debacle knows what I’m talking about.
When gerontocrats like Biden and Lula refuse to step aside for younger leadership, the issue isn’t just decrepitude — it’s democracy.
Then-President Joe Biden was 81 when he decided to run for re-election. He’d already been showing signs of elderly fogginess and fatigue — and, as in Lula’s case, voter polls were taking notice.
But Biden and the dishonest hangers-on around him insisted he was still as sharp as the claws on a Delaware horseshoe crab.
Lula too wants us to know he’s still got “strong leg muscles,” despite sotto voce alerts from folks at the Planalto presidential palace in Brasília that his mind, like Biden’s, has in fact slowed like São Paulo rush-hour traffic.
Cognitive catastrophe
So here’s what Lula may be setting Brazil up for later this year:
He and his sycophantic Workers Party (PT) will cling to the delusion that anyone in his 80s can still effectively run Latin America’s largest country, until some pivotal moment — like Biden’s cognitive catastrophe in the presidential debate of June 2024 — convinces voters otherwise.
Then he’d have to drop out of the race and be replaced — too late — by a substitute PT candidate who will likely be soundly defeated by another Bolsonaro, opening the door to a resurgence of brutish Bolsonarismo.
It would be a reprise of Biden’s inevitable but too-late 2024 drop-out, which all but ensured his vice president and substitute Democratic candidate, Kamala Harris, would lose to another Donald Trump candidacy — opening the door to a more erratic, autocratic and crueler Trumpism.
So, as I wrote in 2024 before Biden finally exited, when gerontocrats refuse to step aside for younger leadership, the issue isn’t just decrepitude — it’s democracy.
Like Biden, Lula — who, don’t forget, was already a two-term president in the 2000s — has been seduced by the idea that he’s the “indispensable man.” He has succumbed to the same egotism that drove Jair Bolsonaro, just as Biden’s stubbornness smacked of Trump’s pomposity.
Like Biden, Lula seems to have forgotten a core principle that democratic government in America and the Americas rests on: no one person is more important than the nation.
Just as important, in the end Biden and Lula won’t only have proven too advanced in years — they’ll both have been too behind the times.
Biden’s presidency was too often stuck in the New Deal mindset of the 20th century, which believed the U.S. had no fiscal limits.
Lula remains entrenched in 20th-century Latin American leftism, the kind that still apologizes for Marxist repression like Cuba’s — and whose economic project still neglects value-added tech in favor of raw commodities.
And no amount of leg presses can make up for that reality.
