Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s narrow victory over incumbent Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil’s runoff presidential election last October has been widely hailed as historic. Not only did the 77-year-old former union leader and two-term president achieve a comeback for the ages, fighting back from prison on a now-overturned corruption conviction to defeat arguably the most significant global imitator of former U.S. President Donald Trump’s brand of brash nativism and post-truth rhetoric, but Lula’s triumph is also being seen as sealing the second coming of the “pink tide,” the surge of left-wing leaders who first came to dominate Latin America in the early 2000s.
Lula’s prodigal return follows a string of other regional leftist presidential triumphs, including those of Colombia’s Gustavo Petro last year, Chile’s Gabriel Boric and Peru’s Pedro Castillo in 2021, Argentina’s Alberto Fernández in 2019, and Mexico’s Andrés Manuel
