WordsByPhinn

Lula Da Silva is probably the most beloved President that Brazil has and he has been trying to make big changes during his 3rd time, with critics having mixed opinions about his effectiveness so far.

Lula Da Silva has been working his whole life trying to better the lives of himself and his fellow Brazilians. After Lula and his family, including his seven siblings, fled to Sao Paolo he began working at age 12 at a variety of different jobs including a shoe shiner and an office boy. At 14 Lula changed his career path and began a 3 year course while working in a screw factory that ended with him being a certified metallurgist. After getting this diploma he began to work in various factories eventually landing in Indústrias Villares, where he first got into contact with the trade union movement alongside his brother José Ferreira da Silva.

In 1969 after working with unions for several years Lula was elected as a substitute on the council of the Metalworkers Union of São Bernardo do Campo and Diadema and was President by 1975, receiving an astonishing 92% of the votes from the over 100,000 workers he represented. After some years, Lula and the other members of his union created the first Worker’s Party and began to campaign for smaller government offices. Lula also suffered his first political arrest due to an organizing a union strike.

Starting in 1989 the Worker’s Party starting putting Lula as a presidential candidate but lost in the first few elections. Finally, in 2002 Lula was elected for his first term as President of Brazil where he worked to improve income distribution and had record levels of job creation while raising the minimum wage in Brazil by over 50%. Due to his changes in his first term, Lula was reelected in a landslide where he got a record shattering 58 million votes to push Lula into a 2nd presidential term.

In his 2nd term Lula continued to earn the love and support of Brazilians when he prepped the country for the wave after the 2008 financial crisis by lowering interest rates and taxes while giving incentives for consumption. These policies allowed Brazil to tank the economic crisis with minimal losses. Due to his consistent work for the good of the people Lula left office in 2011 with a historic 87% approval rating. This would be the 2nd highest ever being George W. Bush in October of 2001 with 92% and George H.W. Bush in February 1991 with 89%. However, the two Bush’s had all time low approval ratings at one point with 19% and 29% respectively, while Silva’s never dropped below 50%.

After leaving his presidential position, Silva got into some legal trouble due to alleged corruption and money laundering in which he was given a beachfront apartment in exchange for helping the oil company Petrobras secure government contracts. He served 580 days in prison before the Supreme Court annulled the conviction due to evidence the judge was biased and lacked jurisdiction. After being released in 2019 he began to build up hype for another run at President, which he won and started his term in January of 2023.

Silva has maintained an approval rating of slightly above 50% throughout the duration of his term so far and he has done it by continuing to attempt to make improvements to the country, his main one being to preserve the climate and more specifically the Amazon. This has led to his COP30 bill in which it has a lot to help slow down the rate of climate destruction and even led to the Amazon rainforest hitting a deforestation low for the first time in 11 years. However, critics such as Guilherme Casarões, assistant professor at the São Paulo School of Business Administration of the Fundação Getulio Vargas still bash Silva for not improving foreign relations and still not taking a side in either the Ukraine or Gaza conflict. Silva has been traveling for 2 months out of the last year trying to give Brazil a permanent place on the world stage.

Silva has been consistently making attempts to continue what he was doing nearly 2 decades ago and he has been succeeding in bringing benefits to his people, and has even been hinting at trying for a 4th term at age 79. This draws a connection to President Trump and his talks to tweak the constitution to allow himself to run for a 3rd time despite having an overall negative public opinion on him. Silva is an example of somebody who can actually maintain his policies and values throughout all of his terms so should there be a discussion to allow more than 2 terms per President in America?