Lula needs a miracle.

• Author: Dudley, Steven

SAO PAULO, BRAZIL

Up until this presidential election, there were only three things that assured Brazil a place in the international news: half-naked women dressed in shiny costumes and parading on a float in Rio during Carnival, a star-studded soccer team winning the World Cup for the nth time, and a severe economic crisis usually ending in a huge International Monetary Fund (IMF) bailout. This year, it's added a fourth.

His name is Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. "Lula," as he's commonly known, is a former metalworker and the presidential candidate for Brazil's leftist Partido dos Trabalhadores (P.T.), or Workers Party. He's not new to politics or the country. In fact, this is the fourth time he's run for president. With the possible exception of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, Lula has done more to upset the balance of power in the region, and perhaps the hemisphere, than any Latin American politician in the last twenty years.

But Lula is facing a formidable opponent. Not Jose Serra, the handpicked successor of President Fernando Henrique Cardoso. Not Ciro Gomes, a former Cardoso aide who is also mounting a strong leftwing challenge. No, Lula's chief opponent is the world financial community. Every time he has gone up in the polls, the country's currency has dropped in value, and its bonds have been downgraded. Goldman Sachs even created a "Lula-meter" to quantify the effect of the candidate's rise in the polls, which has been making almost as many headlines as the country's fifth World Cup title. As George Soros, the former Hungarian currency speculator turned author and philanthropist, told a reporter from a leading Brazilian daily, Folha de S. Paulo, "In Ancient Rome, only the Romans voted. In modern global capitalism, only the Americans vote, not the Brazilians."

Lula has spent his whole career taking on an unforgiving economic market. He represents an entire region where frustration with finicky foreign investors and international banks is building like pressure inside a volcano. Argentines went through five presidents after their economy collapsed late last year. Uruguayans went straight to the stores and started looting after Argentina's woes spread north. In Peru and Paraguay, protesters blocked privatizations of state-run companies earlier this year. In Venezuela, Chavez continues to openly defy the international community by leading OPEC in curbing production and maintaining high oil prices. Bolivia almost elected a coca-picker as its president. And Marxist forces in Colombia have relied on the economic despair the model has created to grow exponentially. Even in Brazil, the pro-market Cardoso publicly chastised investors following a huge run on the Brazilian currency in early August.

The first round of the election is October 6, and the second round runoff is set for October 27.

Lula may not win, but he articulates the region's cry for self-determination, and his popularity speaks volumes about the rising level of anger against the new world economic order. He and Soros, who has become an outspoken critic of the free market that he benefited from for years, actually see eye to eye: As the multimillionaire recently wrote in the Financial Times, "If international financial markets take precedence over the democratic process, there is something wrong with the system."

The first time I saw Lula speak, he was at his second home of sorts. His former colleagues at the metalworkers' union had organized a presidential rally at a soccer stadium in Sao Bernardo, a suburb of Sao Paulo. Sao Bernardo and six adjoining towns make up what's called the "ABC," the industrial hub of the city where car manufacturers such as Volkswagen, Mercedes, and Ford have had factories since the 1960s. Lula lost a finger making motors in the ABC, then helped turn the metalworkers into the strongest labor union in the country.

The stadium, called "May Day," was the site of dozens of rallies during the waning years of Brazil's military dictatorship in the late 1970s. One longtime union member told me that during strikes 200,000 people would fill the seats of May Day while military planes would do fly-bys to intimidate the crowd. Later, the military police threw...