()’s move to head the General Secretariat of the Presidency at the invitation of President Lula (PT), announced this Monday (20), occurred after a prolonged period of conversations with the PT member, which took months to make the change.
Since March, when it became public that Lula was considering the psolista as minister, Boulos, 43, went from being a discreet deputy to organizing street events that attracted the largest number of left-wing activists in recent years.
In July, the call for the Frente Povo Sem Medo, of which Boulos is a member, took place on a Thursday night to defend the federal government’s economic policies, such as the exemption from Income Tax for those who receive up to R$5,000 per month, and in protest against Donald Trump’s tariffs. The number of protesters was calculated by the Cebrap Political Debate Monitor, from USP.
On September 21st, the movement was also at the forefront of several acts, across the country, against the amnesty project and the Blindagem PEC. In the same Paulista, Cebrap calculated the presence of 42.4 thousand people, the number as of September 7th at the location.
In both acts, Boulos’ speeches were among the most prominent and received the most applause from those present. The deputy, who helped call for the demonstrations, said on both occasions that the protests marked “the retaking of the streets” by the left.
Lula’s invitation for him to take over the ministry was accompanied by the request that Boulos not run for public office in 2026 and work for the president’s re-election. Despite appeals from those around the PT, the deputy’s allies rule out an exchange from PSOL to PT.
Boulos must after a second defeat for the City Hall of –para (), last year– which had a more bitter taste than the first, in 2020, when he lost to Bruno Covas (PSDB), who died in 2021.
In the first attempt, still without a mandate, Boulos ran alone with a campaign that had cost R$9.8 million (in corrected values). He obtained 40.6% of the valid votes in the second round.
In the second, with parliamentary experience, support from the PT, Lula’s presence on his platform and a budget of R$81.6 million, confidence among his allies in victory was more solid, but he maintained the .
After the election, sectors of the PSOL and allies linked to social movements associated the defeat with strategic campaign errors, such as attempts to soften the deputy’s image to prevent him from being treated as “radical” and “invader” by his opponents. Boulos’s milder version was surprised by the electorate, according to the evaluation, as it made him less spontaneous and less energetic, clashing with the disruptive and anti-systemic profile presented in previous ones.
For those around Boulos, the psolista would have become disenchanted with the daily life of the , which is why he would have accepted Lula’s invitation to be minister and given up trying to be re-elected. Elected federal deputy in 2022, with more than one million votes, he was the champion of votes in São Paulo and the second most voted name in Brazil – behind only Bolsonaro supporter Nikolas Ferreira (PL-MG).
In the party, Boulos’ decision is treated with pragmatism. PSOL leaders understand that congresswoman Erika Hilton meets the requirements to become the vote-puller in the Chamber next year and that it will be positive for the Lula government if Boulos tries to bring him back to social movements.
The role of interlocutor, say people close to him, was already performed by him as leader of the (Homeless Workers Movement). The term as deputy, for them, has been discreet and without major projects.
Boulos’ trajectory
The son of doctors and coming from a middle-class upbringing, Boulos came to politics through the MTST, which he joined at the age of 19 and where he established himself as one of the main leaders. In his history there are direct clashes with previous governments of Lula, who has publicly joked about the fact that he had heard of the psolist for the first time when he was protesting in front of the president’s apartment, in 2003, in São Bernardo do Campo.
At the time, during Lula’s first presidential term, Boulos and the MTST occupied an empty Volkswagen lot in the city, the PT member’s political birthplace.
Eleven years later, Boulos was one of the biggest leaders of the MTST in the occupation known as , in Itaquera, in the east zone of the capital of São Paulo. The movement protested against expropriations for the construction of Arena Corinthians in the region. It was Lula who organized Caixa’s financing to build the stadium, the opening stage of the 2014 World Cup.
Dilma Rousseff’s impeachment process in 2016 brought Boulos and Lula closer together. The PT even invited him to join, but the MTST leader preferred PSOL. He arrived at the party through an articulation made by the former deputy (RJ), still in 2017, already thinking about launching him to the Presidency of the Republic the following year.
The idea was supported by the then president of the party, Juliano Medeiros, despite internal resistance from the party. Before becoming a candidate, Boulos consulted with Lula and heard from him that the candidacy would give him experience. That year, Boulos ran for President with today’s minister Sônia Guajajara (Indigenous Peoples) as vice president. The ticket received 617 thousand votes (0.6%) and finished in 10th place among the 13 candidates.
Boulos’ relationship with Lula already provoked jealousy among PT members. The president paid special attention to the psolista before handing himself over to the Federal Police, in April 2018, in a speech given to the militants in front of the ABC Metalworkers Union. There, Boulos was already identified internally and externally as Lula’s possible political heir.
In the 2022 elections, the psolista gave up running for the São Paulo government in exchange for Lula’s support to run for Mayor. At the end of 2024, after the defeat to Ricardo Nunes, the mayor’s accusations that Boulos did not have management experience led some PT members to bet that Lula would include the deputy in his ministerial reform. Thus, in their view, the president would not leave a possible heir with an outdated resume and prestige.
