At the height of the first victorious presidential contest in 2002, the PT HQ sought to react to the campaign of fear spread by its opponent ().
The second of the three volumes of Lula’s written by Fernando Morais, 79, which arrives in bookstores this Saturday (28) through Companhia das Letras, shows behind the scenes of the formula found at the time by the PT campaign, but purposefully omits a central character to the reaction: Morais himself.
At a campaign event that year, the journalist took the stage and read the poem “The other Brazil that comes there”, written in 1926 by Gilberto Freyre. Lula took the sheet of paper with the poem from Morais and started repeating it in campaign speeches.
The next step came with Duda Mendonça, the PT marketer, who adopted the slogan “Hope will overcome fear”, inspired precisely by those verses. It was also a response to the global actress, who had appeared on Serra’s TV program saying she was afraid of Lula.
In the passage in the book that deals with this, the person who read the poem in front of Lula is identified only as “speaker”. In an interview with Sheetthe journalist says he was uncomfortable with the possibility of appearing as the protagonist and revealed that he was the hidden character: “I ended up eliminating myself”.
Lula’s biography is a trilogy. The was released in 2021, with a focus on his poor childhood and rise as a trade unionist, with emphasis on unprecedented behind-the-scenes footage of the PT member’s arrest after being convicted in Lava Jato.
“Lula: Volume 2” deals with the period from the 1982 defeat to the Government of São Paulo until the first presidential victory, in 2002, going through Diretas Já, Constituinte, Caravans da Cidadania, internal fights and the harsh defeats of 1989, 1994 and 1998.
Compared to volume 1, volume 2 is more informative and less electrifying. In the first volume, Morais holds the reader with previously unknown backstories of the moment Lula is arrested and the 580 days he spends in the Federal Police building in Curitiba.
The new book continues with stories in which the biographer himself disappears for a few pages and becomes a side character. This is how it is when dealing with, the Real Plan and the PT’s parallel government in the management of.
“It’s absolutely impossible to write a story about a guy like Lula without leaving the central trunk of the tree and going out to parallel branches. Sometimes they are longer branches”, says the author.
The reader must be prepared for two main characteristics of the work.
First, the narrative is clear and objective. It mixes context and behind-the-scenes in a fluid way from a text by an award-winning writer who writes classics such as “Olga” and “Chatô”. It is not a book for beginners, but for beginners. Morais agrees: “For those who are beginners and have not experienced [o período] Maybe it’s more valid.”
And Morais was a witness to different passages in the book, as a journalist or during his period as a state deputy for São Paulo, from 1978 to 1982.
The second point is that the author has been a friend of the biographer for decades. On the one hand, this gave him a privileged position of access to repeated interviews with Lula. On the other hand, it gives the book a more uncritical tone, sometimes even directly defending the central character.
Morais states that he never anticipated excerpts from the book to Lula and also never failed to publish some behind-the-scenes information to protect it. “There’s nothing I’ve known that wasn’t in both books.”
In volume 1, for example, Morais avoids dealing with the billion-dollar embezzlements discovered by Lava Jato. In volume 2, the Santo André case goes almost unnoticed, a corruption scandal that came to light after the murder of Celso Daniel and that paralyzed the party on the eve of the 2002 election.
“You will see that this has very little relevance in the history of Lula and the history of the PT”, says the author about the crisis in the city of ABC in São Paulo.
In volume 2, unlike the more critical tone of the press in the first book, Morais highlights the role of the main media outlets in the 1980s and 1990s. He cites, for example, the newspaper’s exclusive report on .
Over the course of 14 chapters, the book helps to understand Brazil in the 1990s — a country with shocking scenes of misery, before effective actions of income transfer programs and compensation in health and education.
Lula’s bad mood appears at different times, as does his lack of concern with his death in 1994.
“The people who go to our rallies and vote for PT want to know about football, not football”, he told advisors, according to the book, when complaining angrily about the postponement of a rally hours after the pilot’s tragic death.
appears alongside Lula throughout almost the entire book. They play together in most episodes, especially in presidential defeats and internal PT disputes. What draws attention, however, are moments when they clash.
The first is Dirceu’s fry in the 1994 São Paulo government race. “In a way, he left me watching ships,” Dirceu said to Morais about Lula and his surroundings.
The second is when Dirceu is barred from speaking at the sound car on Avenida Paulista after the victory in 2002. When trying to react to the veto, he hears the explanation of another PT member: “It wasn’t me who decided that. It was Lula.”
For “Lula: Volume 3”, with no publication date yet, what remains are Lula’s first two terms (2003-2006 and 2007-2010), his administration (2011-2016) and the beginning of Lava Jato.
What about Lula-3 and the 2026 elections?
“My idea is to end volume 3 with his victory over Bolsonaro [em 2022]. I have no professional interest in what is happening [agora]he knows? Absolutely none.”
