full name Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (1945–    ), Brazilian labor organizer and political leader, president of Brazil (2003–    ). The seventh in a family of eight children, he was born Oct. 27, 1945, in Garanhuns, Pernambuco State, NE Brazil. In 1952 he migrated with his family to the coastal city of Guarujá, in São Paulo State; four years later, after his parents had separated, his mother moved with the children to the city of São Paulo, where the family lived in a one-room apartment at the back of a bar. Da Silva, who had held various part-time jobs from the age of seven, left grade school to become a factory worker when he turned 14; he lost the little finger of his left hand in an industrial accident in the 1960s. His first marriage ended in tragedy when his wife died in childbirth in 1970; he married for a second time in 1974.

Encouraged by his brother, a member of the banned Brazilian Communist party, he took an active role in the Metalworkers' Trade Union of São Bernardo do Campo and Diadema, which represented some 100,000 workers in the São Paulo metropolitan region. He became a full-time union official in 1972 and was elected union president three years later. During the late 1970s he organized a series of strikes, for which he was briefly jailed in 1980; during the same year, he founded the Workers' party (Partido dos Trabalhadores; PT), a socialist organization. By this time, he had become nationally known under the nickname Lula, which he made part of his legal name in the early 1980s.

Lula lost his 1982 race for governor of São Paulo State but won a seat in the federal Chamber of Deputies in 1986. He ran unsuccessfully as the PT candidate for the Brazilian presidency in 1989, 1994, and 1998. In October 2002, however, he led the first round of presidential balloting and won the runoff election with 61.3 percent of the popular vote, defeating José Serra (1942–    ) of the governing Brazilian Social Democratic party (PSDB).

The first Brazilian president to come from the working class, Lula took office on Jan. 1, 2003, pledging to end hunger, implement land reform, combat corruption, and stimulate economic growth. Many of his initial efforts, however, were designed to reassure international lenders, whose support was needed if Brazil was to avoid defaulting on its $250 billion public debt. Lula's image as a reformer was weakened by, though he was not personally implicated in, corruption scandals involving members of the PT. He still won a second 4-year term, with almost 61 percent of the popular vote, in the runoff election of October 2006, defeating his PSDB challenger Geraldo José Rodrigues Alckmin Filho (1952–    ), the former governor of São Paulo state. But Lula's Workers' Party did not win a majority in either the Chamber of Deputies or the Senate. Despite his strong personal mandate, Lula needed support from other parties to carry out his programs.