The 2026 party is made up, in general terms, of leaders who dictate the party’s direction, but have only a political relationship with , and an old guard who remains close to the president, although without as much internal power.
The senator is a rare case of PT member at the intersection between these two groups, and that is why the , triggered by this Thursday (18), has the potential to cause so much electoral damage.
Government leader in the Senate, Wagner has been one of the president’s greatest confidants for decades.
Not even the fact that he was close to Marisa Letícia, first lady who died in 2017, kept him from interacting with Lula, unlike other figures who were linked to her and who ended up distancing themselves from the president because of Janja.
More than just a friend, Wagner is someone who Lula trusts blindly, which helps him remain in the role of leader of the president in the Senate, at least for now. Any other smaller figure would certainly have already been raffled off.
Some episodes illustrate this symbiosis. In , the “Galician” was Lula’s first option, who was in prison, to take over the presidential candidacy in his place. Wagner declined and passed the baton to that occasion.
Perhaps even more emblematic was the 2006 election, when Lula truly began to respect Wagner’s analytical capacity. At the time, the current senator ran for Government of Bahia, challenging a godson of the powerful Antonio Carlos Magalhães, the country’s largest regional chief at that time.
The president thought his friend was delusional about his chances of winning and predicted that he would lose in the first round.
Wagner correctly assessed that the effect of the government’s social programs would transform the state into a PT stronghold for years. Not only did he triumph, but he gave Lula an image that went down in history, of ACM sitting on a sofa with his head down, absorbing the shock of defeat.
As a result, the PT has been in charge of Bahia for 20 years, and Wagner remains the undisputed leader of the party in the state, even with competition from , his successor in the state government and part of the group with whom Lula has a more formal than personal relationship.
The parallelism of Wagner and Lula’s biographies helps a lot to flesh out the comradeship between the two. Both were politically baptized into trade unionism – the president, a metalworker from ABC, the senator, a petrochemist from Bahia – and are from the same generation (at 75 years old, the senator is five years younger than the president).
Handsome and a good speaker like his friend who occupies the Palácio do Planalto, Wagner has the size within the party to tune out the choir whenever he wants. It was not uncommon for her to become irritated when she presided over the PT or took care of the government’s political coordination, as she disagreed with the official line.
The senator knows he has a warm back, whether due to his robust internal trajectory or his direct relationship with Lula.
The question now is how far this support goes. A party man, Wagner is aware that he has become an easy target for Lula’s opponents.
A few hours after the PF operation, allies were salivating at the unexpected opportunity they received to, if not tie the game in the Master case, at least reduce the damage generated by the exchange of messages from the com senator.
Even the senator’s political stature did not spare him from angry comments within the government and the PT, from people who found themselves deceived by the series of assurances given by him that there was nothing compromising in the endless denunciations pouring out of the cell phones of the banker and allies.
Breach of trust, naivety and egocentrism were accusations that appeared in the PT against Wagner, who, for now, survives politically, with oxygen supplied by Lula. But it is precisely his relationship with his old friend that leaves him most exposed.
