It has been an extraordinary life. Born in a small town deep in the interior of Brazil’s impoverished northeast, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva became a trade union leader in São Paulo’s metal-­bashing belt before going on to found the left-wing Workers’ Party (PT) and twice be elected as his country’s president. He then suffered a seemingly terminal setback, being jailed for corruption, before being freed and elected once again in 2022. It is not over yet: at the age of eighty he is preparing to run for the presidency yet again this autumn. Hailed as a leader of the ‘Global South’, he is the most substantial and intriguing Latin American political figure of the 21st century. Yet he has disappointed almost as much as he has inspired.

Lula, as he is universally known, divides Brazilians. He is loved and hated in almost equal measure. Nevertheless, Richard Lapper, a former Latin American editor at the Financial Times who has lived in Brazil, has pulled off the difficult task of producing an objective and thought-provoking biography, the best available in English. The first half of the book focuses on his subject’s life before he became president in 2002. When Lula was seven, his mother took her family on a bone-shaking thirteen-day journey in a converted lorry to Santos to join his father, who had taken up with another woman. Santos and the nearby industrial city of São Paulo would turn Lula from ‘a quiet, poorly educated rural boy into a streetwise and ambitious adolescent’. He completed the fourth grade of primary school – something only a fifth of Brazilian children managed in those days – and then landed a place at a government-backed training school to train as a lathe operator, ‘the best thing that happened in my life,’ he said later. ‘To be a skilled man was a dream.’

The young Lula was no radical, being more interested in football, girls and beer. He played no part in the guerrilla groups that ineffectually fought the military dictatorship that had taken power in 1964. Indeed he was, Lapper notes, an initially reluctant trade unionist. But it was his leadership of