Lula returns to the presidency after the historic Brazil 2022 runoff that presented two antagonistic country models. The leader of the Partido dos Trabalhadores (Workers’ Party) won an unassailable 50.9% to 49.1% and 2,125,334 votes more than his rival.

“They tried to bury me alive, but here I am”, Lula who was arbitrarily imprisoned for 580 days to get him out of politics said while addressing a huge crowd after wining the presidential elections in the Sunday runoff.

He will have to face tough challenges after he sits at Planalto Palace (presidential office), particularly because he will have to deal with a Congress controlled by the opposition, a polarized country and deep social problems such as increased poverty, precarious employment and violence that Bolsonaro is leaving behind.

Thirty-three million people do not have enough to eat every day in a country that had emerged from the hunger map after Lula da Silva’s governments. The social issue will be a priority for Lula upon his return to the Planalto.

Long lines of people waiting to receive meat bones outside butcher shops in Rio de Janeiro or Cuiabá (Mato Grosso), as well as in cities in the poor northeast: that is the image of hunger in Brazil governed four years by Jair Bolsonaro (2018-2022) and two by Michel Temer.

Thirty-three million people have nothing to eat every day in a country that had left the hunger map in 2014, after the consecutive administrations of Lula da Silva (2003-2010) and the first term of Dilma Rousseff.

The situation reached paroxysm in the pandemic, in the midst of a virus denialist government that delayed the purchase of vaccines. With 700,000 deaths, Brazil is today the second country in Latin America in terms of deaths from Covid in relation to its population, after Peru.

A government based on a far-right discourse that radiates hatred and discrimination leaves a more unequal and violent country.

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