Luiz_Inácio_Lula_da_Silva--Hugo_Chavez

Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (Brazilian Portuguese: [luˈiz iˈnasju ˈlulɐ dɐ ˈsiwvɐ] ; born Luiz Inácio da Silva; 27 October 1945), also known as Lula da Silva or simply Lula, is a Brazilian politician who is the 39th and current President of Brazil since 2023. A member of the Workers' Party, Lula was also the 35th president from 2003 to 2010. He also holds the presidency of the G20 since 2023.
Lula quit school after second grade to work, and did not learn to read until he was ten years old. As a teenager, he worked as a metalworker and became a trade unionist. Between 1978 and 1980 he led workers' strikes during Brazil's military dictatorship, and in 1980 he helped start the Workers' Party during Brazil's political opening. Lula was one of the leaders of the 1984 Diretas Já movement, which demanded direct elections. In 1986, he was elected a federal deputy in the state of São Paulo. He ran for president in 1989, but lost in the second round. He went on to also lose two other presidential elections, both in 1994, and then in 1998. He finally became president in 2002, in a runoff. In 2006, he was re-elected in the second round.
Described as left-wing, his first presidency, which coincided with the region’s first pink tide, was marked by the consolidation of social welfare programs such as Bolsa Família and Fome Zero. During his two terms in office, he undertook reforms which eventually led to growth in GDP, reduction in public debt and inflation, and helping 20 million Brazilians escape poverty. Illiteracy, unemployment, infant mortality, and child labor rates fell, while the minimum wage and average income increased, and access to school, university, and health care was expanded. He also played a role in foreign policy, both on a regional level and as part of global trade and environment negotiations.He embraced China and stated his commitment to its view that it was the sole legal representative of the whole of China--including Taiwan, was longtime friends with and supported Cuban president Fidel Castro and Venezuelan presidents Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro, warmly hosted Iranian president Ahmadinejad, and said that Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy was as responsible as Russian president Putin for Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
During his first two terms, Lula was considered one of the most popular politicians in Brazil's history while president, and one of the most popular in the world; however, by September 2023, 38% of those polled considered him to be good or excellent, while 30% considered him to be average, and 31% viewed Lula as bad or terrible. His first term was marked by notable scandals, including the Mensalão vote-buying scandal. After the 2010 Brazilian general election, he was succeeded by his former chief of staff, Dilma Rousseff, and remained active in politics and gave lectures. In 2016, he was appointed Rousseff's chief of staff (a position comparable to that of prime minister), which would have shielded him from arrest in the ongoing criminal investigation against him, but his appointment was suspended by the Supreme Federal Court.
In July 2017, Lula was convicted on charges of money laundering and corruption in a trial. He attempted to run in the 2018 Brazilian presidential election, but was disqualified under Brazil's Ficha Limpa law. Lula was sentenced to nine and a half years in prison. After an unsuccessful appeal, in which his sentence was increased to 12 years, Lula was arrested in April 2018. He spent 580 days in jail. He was released in November 2019, when the Supreme Federal Court ended mandatory imprisonment of convicted criminals after only their first appeal failed, which were the circumstances under which he and many others had been imprisoned. In March 2021, the Supreme Court ruled 3-2 that the federal judge who had presided over his case, Sergio Moro, had been biased. In April 2021 his conviction was nullified by the supreme court, because the trial court had lacked proper jurisdiction over his case, and a retrial in the proper jurisdiction was ordered. In June 2021 all of the cases that Moro had brought against Lula were annulled. Lula was then legally allowed to make another run for president, which he did in the 2022 election, where he defeated Jair Bolsonaro in a runoff. He became the first Brazilian president to be elected to a third term, and the first to have defeated an incumbent president. At age 77, he was sworn in on 1 January 2023, as the oldest Brazilian president at the time of inauguration.