Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva launched his seventh presidential campaign on Sunday before roughly 20,000 supporters at Vila Euclides stadium in São Bernardo do Campo, the industrial city where he addressed striking metalworkers in 1979 and co-founded the Workers' Party a year later.
Lula, who won a historic third term in 2022, leads polls against his main rival, Senator Flávio Bolsonaro, who is standing in place of his father Jair Bolsonaro, the former president barred from running after receiving a 27-year sentence for coup plotting. Polls show Lula with a modest lead, though 46% of Brazilians disapprove of his performance and Flávio Bolsonaro carries a 47% rejection rate.
The campaign unfolds in a shifting political landscape: the ABC industrial region has moved rightward, and union density has nearly halved to 8.9% over the past decade as digitally mediated work surged 170%. Lula's government has reduced poverty to a historic low of 23% and raised the minimum wage to 1,600 reais, while dropping earlier pledges to reverse privatizations to maintain fiscal credibility.