John French has written an extraordinary book, from which we can learn a great deal not only about Lula and Brazil, but also about political leadership. Social scientists often worry about delving into the personal, exceptional, and contingent nature of leadership. But contingency is what makes it leadership—recognition of opportunity where its existence was not evident before, identification of a path where none was marked. C. Wright Mills insisted that the sociological imagination must recognize the intersection of biography and history. This has usually been taken to mean that we must identify the way that social forces shape our lives. But in turning everything into social forces, we should not forget that social forces are also human constructions, and biography matters.
Lula and His Politics of Cunning is the fruit of 40 years of work, in which French has immersed himself in the living history of the ABC industrial suburbs of São Paulo and especially of its industrial working class. In his 1992 book, The Brazilian Workers’ ABC: Class Conflict and Alliances in Modern São Paulo, he examined the complicated history of labor organization and the struggles of the working-class left in the first half of the twentieth century; in his second book, he took a deep dive into Brazilian labor law. From the time he was a graduate student at Yale, French has also been a leader in a large cohort of labor and social historians of Latin America whose work has engaged the political history of the region. Some of its members, like John, were either students or colleagues of the great Emília Viotti da Costa.
This book is dense and meticulously researched. The breadth of French’s sources is astonishing. They range from official and personal archives to popular culture, from fiction to police records to masters’ theses, as well as lengthy, extensive, and repeated interviews. The biographical approach to history opens up for us a textured, almost intimate account of a remarkable period in working-class life in the São Paulo suburbs. For the first 15 chapters of the book, he presents us with Lula’s world, populates it with other characters who come alive for us, and sets them in motion with plenty of contradictions showing. The world in which Lula grew to maturity was a thoroughly gendered world; the women in the story were mothers, wives, sisters, or girlfriends. In the last few chapters, the perspective is more distant and more analytical. Although I missed the granularity of the earlier account, I recognize that once Lula became a national and international figure, greater distance was inevitable.
I focus here on three aspects of French’s account of Lula’s trajectory. The first has to do with life story, the second with language, and the third with politics and publics. It is noteworthy that throughout the book, he uses the character of Fernando Henrique Cardoso as a kind of foil, evolving in parallel and in contact with Lula’s story. The interaction between the two continues today, as Lula’s May 21, 2021 encounter and fist bump with Fernando Henrique were widely covered in the Brazilian press and taken to signify the latter’s acceptance of Lula’s return to political life.
Life Story
We can look at Lula’s life story as background to his extraordinary rise from a hardscrabble childhood to a popular presidency. But Lula’s story, like Barack Obama’s, was also an ongoing political asset—empowering his supporters, giving them confidence to follow him. Of course, both life stories also generated mistrust among those for whom the rise of a black man with a Kenyan father, or of a metalworker whose formal schooling ended in primary school, were sources of scorn or of fear. Brazil’s recovery from the economic downturn of the mid-1960s stimulated massive investment in the automobile plants of São Paulo’s industrial suburbs, bringing a surge in demand for labor, both skilled and unskilled. It was the right moment to be young, ambitious, and willing to work hard in São Bernardo. With great effort, Lula’s mother had managed to get her youngest son enrolled in SENAI, where he received training not only in skilled metallurgical work but also in the collateral fields that equipped him to solve problems that might arise in his work. Lula wanted to get a good job, build a house, start a family, and help out other family members. He was also sociable, played a lot offutbol, and went out drinking with his friends. He was not interested in politics as a young man, however much his brother Frei Chico, a labor activist and member of the Brazilian Communist Party, tried to recruit him.
At the same time as it offered such promise, the system placed plenty of roadblocks in the way of metalworkers’ ambitions. In no position to challenge the power either of employers or the state, subalterns learned to flatter the right people and to find workarounds that would help to achieve their goals without outright confrontation. These were the roots of what French calls Lula’s “politics of cunning,” a set of relational skills that emerged from the experience of growing up in São Bernardo at a particular moment in history.
Although the essentials of Lula’s personal biography have been told elsewhere, French paints a vivid picture of the setting and lived experience of family, friendships, and events from which Lula the historical individual emerged. Emergence seems like the right word to use here. Lula was not the expected result of a set of social circumstances and events. Although Lula’s history can be read backwards, it cannot be reduced to the elements that unexpectedly gave rise to one of the region’s most influential and charismatic politicians. We should not be surprised that “there is only one Lula.”
Language
Accustomed as we now are to Lula’s seeming ease in speaking to almost any kind of gathering, it is hard to imagine a younger Lula who was shy and tongue-tied. His natural friendliness and curiosity built him a strong network of relationships. Lula’s entry into the leadership of the São Bernardo metalworkers’ union came at the behest of metalworker president Paulo Vidal, who thought him pliable.
Lula took full advantage of the opportunities that the union’s various educational programs offered him. He expanded his personal networks and prepared for leadership. Because he found speaking up in meetings difficult, he took classes in speech and oratory. He learned practical administration and how to run a large organization with a substantial budget. Supporting Lula as candidate to succeed him as union president, Vidal expected to remain the power behind the throne, but by that time Lula was prepared to speak for himself. That determination to “speak for himself’ and not have his words orchestrated by others with different agendas remained consistent. In rally speeches to ever-larger crowds of strikers in 1978—80, he demonstrated an ability to empathize, to put into words the feelings of those to and for whom he was speaking. He also showed an ability to lead, to say things they did not want to hear.
Lula also became known for his ability to converse with anyone, however divergent their views, from state politicians and business leaders to officers of DOI- CODI. His mental acuity and emotional intelligence made a formidable combination. French stresses Lula’s empathy when he compares Lula’s oratory with that of Hugo Chávez, whose emotional ground was anger and confrontation. French attributes the difference to Chávez’s background as a military officer, where his engagement was mainly with small groups, while Lula was politically formed as a subaltern, in mass struggles, fighting to have a voice. Chávez’s narratives focused on oppositions—on us vs. them; he sought to epitomize his followers. Lula’s gift was to build convergence across difference and to promote more autonomous forms of popular organization.
A defining feature of these working folk’s consciousness was their self-perception as small and weak; hence the cultivation of guile and cunning as their weapon of choice vis-á-vis the powerful. Cunning was also admired in those who wished to be leaders; hence the respect for Lula, who proved a master at being everything to everyone. For working people to achieve their hopes required a leader capable of maneuvering within existing power relations to take advantage of small rifts among the superordinate without being reduced to their power…. At the same time, the price of such maneuvering was that the led might think the leader suspect, so it was essential that they believe in the leader’s integrity, commitment, and loyalty. (335—36)
The major Brazilian media have long mocked Lula’s style of speech for its aggressive tone (especially in the 1989 election), for its use of colloquialisms, and for its grammar. Comments on Lula’s grammar and use of vulgar expressions were intended as comments on his fitness for office. Elegant speech was taken as a sign of intelligence and class, with Fernando Henrique Cardoso the most frequent example. French quotes FHC in one of his memoirs commenting on Lula’s “atrocious grammar,” which continues to unnerve Brazilian elites to this day.
This Book Is Not About the Workers’ Party
This book is about Lula as a leader, and not about the party he led. But since John French praised my 1992 book on the PT for recognizing the importance of Lula’s leadership for its formation, it doesn’t seem entirely out of line for me to lament his relative neglect of the PT’s importance for the formation of Lula. Although his charisma grew out of his union activities, the political sophistication of the man who became president in 2003 owed a lot to the political education he received in the 20 years since he first ran for governor of São Paulo and the struggles in which he engaged, inside and outside the party. Even though Lula insisted that his 2002 presidential campaign be freed from the strictures of party control, it was still built on party foundations.
The PT, too, has changed, and this book would not have been the place to discuss that. Although Lula was always the face of the party and sometimes the glue that held it together, his ability to remain at the head of it was not entirely due to his charisma or his cunning, or his ability to be all things to all people. He also surrounded himself with people who understood organizational power, in the party and later in the presidency. From the coalitional Articulação to the tightly constructed Grupo Majoritario, the same leadership group maintained control of the party from 1995 to its breakdown in the mensalão scandals of 2005 (Ribeiro Reference Ribeiro2014, 95).
The relative absence of the party in the narrative makes French’s dismissal in passing of thepetismo-lulismo debates seem wrong.Footnote 1 On page 339 he characterizes it as follows:
has petismo, the PT’s doctrinal core centered in the party, degenerated into populism and an amorphous cult of personality—lulismo—accompanied by a weak reformism, the fostering of mass consumerism, and a failure to raise the political consciousness of the millions who benefited from the Lula-Dilma government’s policies?
The scholarly debate around these terms is relevant not only to gauge support for PT governments but also to understand the radical polarization that has wracked Brazil since 2013. Parts of the upper echelons of Brazilian society have always derided—even sometimes expressed hatred for—both Lula and the PT. But until 2013, supporters and opponents could still be friends. Especially after the campaign to impeach Dilma Rousseff, the famed (though often exaggerated) “cordiality” of Brazilians broke down, and many Brazilian families could no longer even celebrate holidays together. In the midst of such visceral hatred, parties could no longer be parts, and the resulting antiparty sentiment goes a long way toward explaining the victory of Bolsonaro in 2018. But although at the end of the book French does recount these reversals and Lula’s imprisonment, he has not prepared us for them in earlier parts.
Conclusions
French probably knows more about the history of the place and social world from which Lula emerged than anyone alive, and certainly better than anyone working in English. It says a great deal about this book that contributors to this symposium wished that there were a second volume. But perhaps we should wait. If Lula’s cunning is up to the task of helping to bridge the chasms that rend Brazilian politics and society now, there are many chapters to be written.
