Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has done it again. On Sunday, Brazilians returned him to the presidency for a fourth time, with 51.8 per cent of the vote against Flávio Bolsonaro, the son of the former president who is now serving a 27-year sentence for plotting a coup. The margin, nearly 4.4 million votes, was narrow, and the country remains deeply divided. But at a time when the far right is winning or threatening to win across much of the world, the largest country in South America, and a founding member of BRICS, has chosen a different path. This is a significant victory for progressive politics, and it deserves to be understood properly, especially in Pakistan.

The question worth asking is why Brazil has resisted the global tide when so many others have not. The answer lies less in Lula's undoubted charisma than in what his government actually did. Redistribution has been at the heart of his agenda from his first term, when Bolsa Família transferred cash to millions of poor families on the condition that their children attended school and received vaccinations. In his third term, he expanded it, raised the minimum wage, and pushed through Congress a tax reform, in force since January, under which some 10 million Brazilians earning up to 5,000 reais a month no longer pay income tax and 5 million more pay less, while the very rich face a new minimum rate. The results have been visible in ordinary lives. Poverty fell substantially, real wages rose, food insecurity declined, and unemployment dropped from above 9 per cent in 2022 to around 5.4 per cent this year. In 2025, Brazil left the United Nations' Hunger Map, a milestone first reached in 2014 under the Workers' Party, only to be lost in the years that followed. The International Monetary Fund now projects that Brazil will become the world's eighth-largest........

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