On the face of it, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has done the impossible one more time - within three weeks he overturned defeat in first-round voting to gain re-election as Brazil's president. It was no mean achievement for a man who before his first successful run at the post in 2002 had tried three times unsuccessfully. When he became president in 2003, he came to office as the first leftist leader of Brazil in nearly half a century.
Now aged 80 and with plenty of experience at governing as large a democracy as Brazil, he has bucked the trend of electoral victory for right-wing leaders in Latin America whose policies mirror that of US President Donald Trump. Lula's first presidential victory in 2002 marked the end of an unprecedented journey from poverty. The son of a poor, illiterate peasant family, Lula worked as a peanut seller and shoe-shine boy as a child, only learning to read when he was 10 years old.
He went on to train as a metalworker and found work in an industrial city near São Paulo, where he lost the little finger of his left hand in an accident in the 1960s. Lula was not initially interested in politics, but threw himself into trade union activism. Elected leader of the 100,000-strong Metalworkers' Union in 1975, he transformed trade union activism in Brazil by turning what had mostly been government-friendly organisations into a powerful independent movement.
In 1980, Lula brought together a combination of trade unionists, intellectuals, Trotskyites and Church activists to found the Workers' Party (PT), the first major socialist party in the country's history. The PT went on to gradually replace its revolutionary commitment to changing the power structure in Brazil with a more pragmatic, social democratic platform. Lula came to power promising major reforms to the country's political and economic system.
He vowed to eradicate hunger and create a self-confident, caring, outward-looking nation. In his time in office, Lula pumped billions of dollars into social programmes and can reasonably claim to have helped reverse Brazil's historic inequalities. By increasing the minimum wage well above the rate of inflation and broadening state help to the most impoverished with a family grant programme, the Bolsa Familia, he helped some 44 million people and cemented his support among the poor.
However, many commentators argue that the programme failed to address the structural problems that underpin poverty, such as a lack of education. He left office eight years later, after serving two terms as president, enjoying exceptionally high popularity ratings for a retiring Latin American leader - having raised Brazil's profile on the international scene and presided over the longest period of economic growth in three decades. Unable to run for a third term, Lula left the presidency and, shortly afterwards, was diagnosed with throat cancer.
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