During his first two consecutive terms in office, he continued fiscal policies and promoted social welfare programs such as Bolsa Família that eventually led to growth in GDP, reduction in external debt and inflation, and helping 20 million Brazilians escape poverty.

[8] Two weeks after Lula's birth, his father moved to Santos, São Paulo, with – though Eurídice was not aware of it – her younger cousin Valdomira Ferreira de Góis.

[23][25] Inspired by his brother Frei Chico, a member of the Brazilian Communist Party, Lula joined the labour movement when he worked at Villares Metals, rising through the ranks.

Lula in the 2002 election, defeated PSDB candidate José Serra in a runoff, to become the country's first leftist president following the fall of the military dictatorship in Brazil.

[59][60][61] This fueled an economic boom in Brazil, which in turn allowed Lula to spend heavily on social programmes and pay off a $15 billion IMF loan a year early.

[67][68][69][70] In March 2006, Lula's finance minister Antonio Palocci, who had continued the anti-inflation and pro-market policies of the previous centrist government, resigned due to his involvement in a corruption and abuse of power scandal.

[90] In February 2010, Lula's government approved the construction of a controversial hydroelectric mega Belo Monte Dam in the middle of the Amazon rain forest in the Brazilian state of Pará.

[110] Shirin Ebadi, Iranian human rights activist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate called Lula's comments a "powerful message to the Islamic Republic".

[119] In May 2010, Lula and Turkey's prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan negotiated a preliminary fuel swap agreement with the Iranian government on uranium enrichment, that ultimately failed.

[120] The preliminary agreement that they presented to the United Nations was at odds with what the International Atomic Energy Agency and other countries viewed as necessary actions to stop Iran from obtaining weapons grade materials.

"[122] Moisés Naím, editor in chief of Foreign Policy magazine and former Minister of Trade in Venezuela, said "Lula is a political giant, but morally he has been a deep disappointment.

It's more like the immature act of a dictator of a third-rate republic..."[131] Brazil's second largest union, Força Sindical, issued a statement expressing concern that: "it is a reaction typical of authoritarian governments that don't like contrary voices.

[132][133] The government also proposed the establishment of a National Cinema and Audiovisual Agency that would have the power to conduct prior reviews of programming and to veto certain programmes if they believed that they did not to meet standards of "editorial responsibility.

[140][141] His administration was criticized for relying on local, right-of-centre political barons, like José Sarney, Jader Barbalho, Renan Calheiros and Fernando Collor to ensure a majority in Congress.

Analysts felt that he would occasionally give in to left-wing calls for tighter government control on media and increased state intervention: in 2004, he pushed for the creation of a "Federal Council of Journalists" (CFJ) and a "National Cinema Agency" (Ancinav), the latter designed to overhaul funding for electronic communications.

[150] On 21 June 2021, Judge Frederico Botelho de Barros Viana of the 10th Federal Court of Brasilia acquitted all the accused, saying that the prosecution did not convincingly demonstrate that the defendants were involved in a criminal conspiracy.

[175] On 25 January 2018, the Appeal Court of Porto Alegre found Lula guilty of corruption and money laundering and increased his sentence to 12 years of prison[176] for one of the nine charges, while the other eight were still pending.

A group of 17 lawyers, ministers of Justice, and high court members from eight countries reacted to the leaks by describing former president Lula as a political prisoner and calling for his release.

[208] A number of international intellectuals, activists and political leaders, including professor Noam Chomsky and 12 US Congressmen, complained that the legal proceedings appeared to be designed to prevent Lula from running for president in 2018.

U.S. National Security Council spokesman John Kirby responded by accusing Lula of "parroting Russian and Chinese propaganda", describing his comments as "simply misguided" and "suggesting the United States and Europe are somehow not interested in peace, or that we share responsibility for the war".

[289] On 26 April, in a joint press conference, Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez questioned Lula's position, stressing that as the victimized country Ukraine needed to be supported.

[304] That same day, he was accused of "blatant antisemitism" by Dani Dayan, the Chairman of Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Centre, for comparing Israel's actions to Adolf Hitler.

[310] In February 2024, University of São Paulo foreign policy expert Feliciano de Sa Guimaraes said Lula only listens to one side in his government, "the left-wing, anti-American voices who very aggressively speak of a radical change in the global order.

[321][322] At the beginning of September, he presented a major plan to eradicate hunger, as 33 million Brazilians do not have enough to eat, and more than half the country is affected to varying degrees by some form of food insecurity.

[337] In April, Biden pledged to give $500 million to the Amazon Fund which was frozen during the rule of Bolsonaro and reactivated when Lula returned to power, to deal with climate change".

[339] Lula and French president Emmanuel Macron agreed about cooperation between Brazil and France on different environmental issues, including the transmission of 1.1 billion dollars for preserving the Amazon rainforest.

"[345] In late October 2024, Lula suffered a fall in the official residence, which resulted in trauma to the back of his head and a small brain hemorrhage in the temporal-frontal region, prompting him to cancel, under advice from his doctors, a planned trip to a BRICS summit in Russia.

[350][351][352] Although he showed a moderate centre-left liberal tendency economically, he highlighted his closeness with the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela and negatively evaluated Juan Guaidó during the Venezuelan crisis.

[356] On 18 February 2024, Lula told reporters in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia while attending the African Union Summit, "What's happening in the Gaza Strip isn't a war, it's a genocide. ...

[406][407] The 2019 Brazilian documentary, The Edge of Democracy, written and directed by Petra Costa, chronicled the rise and fall of Lula and Dilma Rousseff, and the socio-political upheaval in Brazil during the period.