If he wins the presidential election in October, it will go down as the political comeback of the decade — if not the century. Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a former shoeshine boy and metalworker, benefited from an economic boom as Brazil’s president and left office in 2010 with an approval rating above 80 per cent.

“I was aware that if I reached the presidency of Brazil and my government didn’t work out, a worker would never again be able to think about becoming president,” he says in an interview with the Financial Times at his campaign’s media hub, a hip office space in a fashionable neighbourhood of S?o Paulo.

Under his anointed successor, Dilma Rousseff, however, the economy plunged into a brutal two-year recession — partly as a result of policies introduced in his second term. It has struggled to generate strong, sustained growth ever since.