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He grew up so poor, he didn't find out what bread was until he was 7. That was Lula's age when he climbed onto a truck with his Brazilian dirt-farmer family and all their possessions and made the 1,900-mile journey which took 13 days from country's northeastern village for a life in the slums of São Paulo. He dropped out of school in the fifth grade, shined shoes on the street, and went to work in a factory at 14, losing a finger to a lathe machine in an accident at an auto-parts plant. Eventually he rose through the rank and file to become an internationally respected union leader. On 10 February 1980, a group of academics, intellectuals, and union leaders, including Lula, founded the Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT) or Workers' Party, a left-wing party with progressive ideas created in the midst of Brazil's military government. A military junta ruled Brazil back then, and strikes were illegal, but he defied the generals and the bosses and practically shut down the continent's industrial powerhouse in the name of the steelworkers.

Lula first ran for office in 1982, for the state government of São Paulo and lost. In the 1986 elections Lula won a seat in Congress with a reasonable majority. The Workers' Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores, PT) helped write the country's post-military government constitution, ensuring strong constitutional guarantees for workers' rights, but failed to achieve redistribution of rural agricultural land.

In 1989, still as a Congressman, Lula ran as the PT presidential candidate. Lula refused to run for re-election as a congressman in 1990. He ran again for President in 1994 and 1998. As the political scene in the 1990s came under the sway of the Brazilian real monetary stabilization plan, which ended decades of rampant inflation, Lula lost in 1994 (in the first round) to the candidate former ex-Minister of Finance Fernando Henrique Cardoso, who ran for re-election (after a constitutional amendment ended the long-held rule that a president could not have a second term) in 1998, again winning in the first-round. In 2002 Lula became President after winning the second round of the election, held on 27 October, defeating the Brazilian Social Democracy Party (PSDB) candidate José Serra.