Brazilians go to the polls on Oct. 4 in what looks to be a very close presidential race between left-wing President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and right-wing Sen. Flávio Bolsonaro. Lula, as he is known, is vying for his fourth nonconsecutive term in office. Bolsonaro is the son of former President Jair Bolsonaro, now imprisoned for attempting a coup after losing to Lula in the 2022 election. Much is at stake in the contest—both domestically and in terms of Brazil’s foreign policy.

What has Lula accomplished in office? What are the stakes of the election for Brazil’s relationship with the United States? And for Brazil’s relationship with China?

Brazilians go to the polls on Oct. 4 in what looks to be a very close presidential race between left-wing President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and right-wing Sen. Flávio Bolsonaro. Lula, as he is known, is vying for his fourth nonconsecutive term in office. Bolsonaro is the son of former President Jair Bolsonaro, now imprisoned for attempting a coup after losing to Lula in the 2022 election. Much is at stake in the contest—both domestically and in terms of Brazil’s foreign policy.

What has Lula accomplished in office? What are the stakes of the election for Brazil’s relationship with the United States? And for Brazil’s relationship with China?

Those are just a few of the questions that came up in my recent conversation with FP economics columnist Adam Tooze on the podcast we co-host, Ones and Tooze. What follows is an excerpt, edited for length and clarity. For the full conversation, look for Ones and Tooze wherever you get your podcasts. And check out Adam’s Substack newsletter.

Cameron Abadi: What has Lula accomplished in his most recent term in office as president?

Adam Tooze: Lula administrations in Brazil are very good for ordinary Brazilians and especially Brazilians at the bottom end of the extremely skewed income and wealth distribution. And the facts on this are just completely undeniable. There’s an element here of COVID recovery. Brazil had a very bad COVID under Bolsonaro senior, and it’s bounced back, but it goes way beyond that. So the current unemployment rate in Brazil is a historic record. Youth unemployment, which is an affliction of Brazilian society, is down to around 10 percent, which is unprecedentedly low. The incomes of working people are up by really dramatic numbers, about 20 percent since 2022. Poverty has fallen. Food insecurity has been reduced. Five million families have left the Bolsa Família basic welfare system as a result of increasing prosperity. That system itself has been reformed and improved. There has been substantial adjustment to debt relief [for poor people], mass public housing projects, the whole works, right? So Lula administrations are bona fide reformist administrations in a society afflicted by very large inequality and quite rank class differentiation that’s also then quite heavily racialized. And this is not the first time—this is true of all of his administrations. So they carry through, and they make a real difference.

They also make a very, very significant difference with regard to the global environmental issue—which of course is also a Brazilian issue—which is the Amazon and Amazonian deforestation. [Jair] Bolsonaro was deeply in cahoots with the rancher interest in the Amazon, which is the interest most directly responsible for the most egregious destruction of rainforest. And Lula administrations repeatedly since the early 2000s have, when they come into office, reversed this. So this is a story that’s really dramatically significant for not just Brazil but the whole world.

If you follow the financial press, however, if you follow commentary from Western media on Brazil, you’ll hear a different story. And this is to do with the fact that though unemployment is down and growth is not bad, the big anxiety is that this is essentially being driven by undisciplined fiscal policy. And because Brazil has a history, now decades back but nevertheless a history, of........

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