In the humid, electric final stretch of Brazil’s presidential campaign, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva did something that has become a familiar ritual of his political life: he gathered his people around him, not through a sea of red flags and chants under an afternoon sun, but through a glowing screen, talking straight into the camera with the kind of intimate urgency that has long defined his bond with millions of Brazilians. With exactly twenty days to go before the October 4 vote, Lula called on supporters to turn their living rooms, verandas and buzzing cell phone threads into a vast, living engine of persuasion. His appeal was not merely for votes, but for a way of being together that blends online networks with old-fashioned heart-to-heart. The Workers’ Party had just been through an explosive day of mobilization, more than 1,120 rallies, marches, and events lifting dust across twenty-six of Brazil’s twenty-seven states, in roughly one hundred and thirty cities, with all the energy of a people already half-won. But Lula, at his own quiet distance, chose conversation rather than crowds for his final headline act. He sat alongside activists, communicators, and apostles of the digital word, telling Brazil that in the remaining three weeks, before the window of opportunity snaps shut, truth itself must become a weapon powerful enough to smash the recycled lies plaguing the race. “We need to turn this campaign’s last 20 days into absolute truth that overcomes absolute lies,” he said, in a voice that carried both fatigue and fire, as if this closing chapter might be Brazil’s last chance to decide what kind of country it will carry into the rest of the century.
Lula’s appeal was built around a deeply human tension: the fear that elsewhere, in corners of the internet and in whispers at dinner tables, a battalion of misinformation was painting a world entirely different from the one his government had tried to build. He was not just asking for votes; he was pleading with his supporters to walk beside their neighbors, to look them in the eye and become witness to the reality, an ordinary, fragile, revolutionary act. At the heart of his broad message was an attempt to make clear that this election goes far beyond the next term. It is a contest over the very meaning of Brazil’s future, about national sovereignty, about educational resources, about women’s lives, about the architecture of social policy, about security with dignity. In his live broadcast, he carefully built a contrast that did not need images or slogans to be vivid: the legacy of the former president, Jair Bolsonaro, was a shadow he kept pulling forward into the light, not just as an adversary but as a warning. For Lula, Bolsonaro represented not only a presidency from 2019 to 2022, but a fracture in the country’s moral foundation, whose aftermath he now inherits as a burden and as a purpose. He often repeated that the election will determine the future of Brazilian families and whether the country can decide how its resources are used. But none of it was dry policy recitation; it was the story of a man who believed that in this final stretch, there is no neutral ground—only the possibility of truth coming out with a voice loud enough to overcome the shouting of lies.
Turning to the urgent topics of public safety and the organized crime that has long had a chokehold over neighborhoods, Lula laid out a vision that reaches beyond the visible criminal to the often invisible money that cures them. He spoke of a renewed commitment to intelligence, to expanded staff and rigorous Federal Police methods along Brazil’s porous borders, not only to arrest individuals who steal phones, but to go after the empires that orchestrate theft, drug trade, and money laundering. There was an almost paternal outrage in his emphasis on children turned into fieldworkers by criminal systems—where kids are sent to steal while their leaders collect the profit in offices far away. “Organized crime pays children to steal. But they are the ones who make the money, the ones who buy, dismantle and sell,” Lula said, laying bare the asymmetrical pyramid of blame and responsibility. Considering in the same tone, he described a serious attack on corruption in the National Social Security Institute, a maze of scams and fraudulent benefits. According to Lula, his administration had dismantled the network, some would have been forgotten, and recovered 3.5 billion reais for over five million retirees. At the same time, he announced collections of nearly 6 billion reais that can help to refill the Social Security system, giving old policy a heartbeat of justice. Not only did he name Daniel Vorcaro, a banker whose arrest was announced, and the liquidation of Banco Master through a Central Bank leadership appointed by his government, but Lula also seem to combine personal and procedural seriousness when he said that if evidence ever linked his own son, Fábio Luis, to wrongdoing, serious consequences would follow. That entire portion of his broadcast felt less like a policy speech than a courtroom drama, leaving the viewer with the impression that for Lula, the fight against crime is tethered to the integrity of his own family, and the credibility of all who operate in public life.
Turning the argument to economics and social justice, Lula defended with both pride and nuance the record that his government accomplished when it came to food, welfare, and enormous obligations inherited from the previous administration. He recited figures like a poet of real life: food inflation, which once reached 56.17% during the earlier government could be compared to 13.6% under his current rule; and yet, he candidly acknowledged that food remains expensive, and that slowing price inflation does not magically reverse the accumulated bruises in people’s wallets. He described the transition from Bolsonaro as arriving at the door onward with a jaw-dropping deficit, equivalent to 2.8% of GDP, and with a deficit of 94 billion reais hanging over the shoulder, making it necessary to scramble to find resources for essential programs—Bolsa Família, education, health care—before the new season began. Looking forward than a possible new term, he did not coyly shy away from rigorous challenges: wiping Brazil’s traditional 6×1 schedule, promoting new horizons for full-time education, building homes where the elderly can be cared for with dignity. He pointed toward University for All (Prouni), the Student Financing Fund (Fies), and a powerful program called Pé-de-Meia that pays poverty-stricken secondary students to stay in the classroom, proving that the future begins with presence in school. On natural resources, Lula practically insisted with a shimmer of sovereign pride that Brazil notonly dig its oil, critical minerals, and rare earths, but actually understand them—extract them, refine them, industrialize them inside the country—so the wealth that escapes through wheels can actually be invested in the development within its own people. This was an encompassing vision of economic justice, but you could sense through the screen that he was speaking not just to economists but to mothers, students, retired workers, those who had lost trust or gain through a supermarket cash register. It was the voice of someone asking Brazil to look him in the eyes, and to remember that what comes out of budgets and deficits is also what makes or breaks a wife’s missed sleep, a grandmother’s dignity, a child’s meal.
Underlying this passion is a deeply organized momentum. The PT national president, Edinho Silva, made almost a mantra of the street and network combination: the houses, the networks, the mobilizations, the talking with the Brazilian people, showing the difference between the projects at stake. Their secularized ritual to continue through Election Day, make it concrete, turn it into a river: “The streets, the networks, of these streets, the networks and streets,” as Edinho intoned. Lula repeated himself like a musician stubbornly repeating his deepest chord: “We have no shortage of arguments to defeat the lies Personal and unquestioning.” He reserved some of his sharpest criticisms for those candidates who win elections by lying but cannot govern by lying—who would eventually become like the figures of Collor de Mello and Bolsonaro, surrounded by useless people who have no relationship with the people, no commitment to the people. The message on the surface of the surface was a warning against entertainment and spectacle; beneath the surface, it was profound plea for honesty into sovereignty. A structure that would be repeated, with Lula urging his followers to become digital street preachers, spending many minutes sharing the measurable achievements of his administration. The election, Edinho Silva said, is about “what Brazil we are going to build in the coming decades,” and Lula wrapped his whole second term in that frame. It is not just a shot at the presidency but a chance to reassemble a society after the years of discord, to shape what a nation chooses to do with its resources, its young, its vulnerable, its natural wealth.
In the final act of this grand political spectacle, the numbers and alliances appear as a stage construction of hope. A recent Datafolha poll, released Friday, gave Lula 39% support in the first round, four points ahead of his far-right opponent, Flávio Bolsonaro, son of the former president. The fight has now become a last step for power with the future generations in the balance. Lula enters with a wide—even ecumenical—alliance of political histories: the Worker’s Party, Communist Party of Brazil, the Green Party, the Socialism and Liberty Party, Rede, the Brazilian Socialist Party, and the Democratic Labour Party. This eclectic group of parties which has backed him reflects a deliberate effort to overcome old enemies and draw together progressive fragments with different faces. Under the elegant digital roof of the closing broadcast, PT national communications secretary Éden Valadares and Ana Flávia Marques, interim president of the Lula Institute, joined Lula in what felt like an old-fashioned dream, a touch of institutional memory. The story of Lula’s political destiny adds an even more visceral layer: he governed this giant nation before, from 2003 to 2011, and returned in 2013 after a year. He has tasted defeat, exile, crime, and victory; he has seen the face of the poor in that land, and carries scars. In those last days of a hard-fought campaign, he is not a robot of statistics but a flesh tension between hope and fatigue, a man who knows time is short. The mobilization is his attempt to transform the ordinary number of 200 days into an absolute true, into an event where only the reality of the people’s will remains. This article itself, as it moves through streets and networks, has become both memory and promise: whether the seed of that great truth can hold against the perfect lies of power, the faithful of the common people will be seen again until the night of October 4, seeing Brazil make its inevitable decision, because in Lula’s words, the next twenty days are not just a countdown, they are a beginning of everything that comes after.