Brazilian voters heading to the poll this weekend say Lula is turning the country into another Venezuela

When I moved to Rio de Janeiro to work as a foreign correspondent in the early 1990s, most of my friends, then in their 20s and 30s, were upset that a burly metalworker who campaigned for president on a radical Marxist platform that included income redistribution, defaulting on the country’s debt — nearly $115 billion in 1989 — and blaming the country’s severe economic crisis on outside forces, had lost the country’s first direct democratic presidential election in 1989.After nearly 30 years of dictatorship and four years under the military’s puppet ruler José Sarney, my upper middle class friends were keen to vote in Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who hailed from the country’s impoverished Northeast and had no real plans to stem hyperinflation that rose to about 2,500% a year when I lived there.(The joke going around Rio at that time was that hyperinflation meant it was cheaper to take a taxi rather than a bus, because you only paid for the taxi at the end of your journey, and the bus required payment at the beginning.)Still, I could understand Lula’s appeal among my friends.

Many of them had family who had suffered repression under Brazil’s brutal military regimes between 1964 and 1985.Despite his popularity among young voters, Lula lost in 1989, and again in 1994 and in 1998.His win finally came in 2002, and he served two terms until 2011, winning a third term in 2022 despite his conviction in the country’s largest corruption scandal.

In 2018, he was convicted of taking bribes from engineering firms in return for public contracts and spent a year and a half behind bars, until the Supreme Court ruled that he could appeal his case.Lula and members of his party called the investigation a political smear campaign against them.

Even then, some of my Brazilian friends were quick to defend him.But now on Sunday, as nearly 159 million Brazilians head to the polls, many of those friends have had enough of Lula, now 80, and vying for his fourth term i...