Lula cries victory after 13-year struggle

Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva was a poor 7-year-old when he rode a rickety wooden truck thousands of miles south to Sao Paulo from his hometown in Brazil's impoverished northeast.

Fifty years later, Brazil's president-elect is hopping on helicopters, sporting tailored suits and setting up victory headquarters in a swank Sao Paulo hotel.

Lula's landslide win on Sunday is a testament of how far his struggle has come since his early days as a union leader and democracy fighter in the gritty, industrial outskirts of Sao Paulo.

He lost his first presidential bid in 1989 and failed twice more. But, helped by a move to the political centre, voters handed Lula an ample mandate on Sunday with 61 per cent of their ballots.

Capitalising on discontent with a stagnant economy and runaway violence, Lula will become Brazil's first working class president on January 1 and lead its first elected leftist government.

"It was obviously a very emotional moment for us because we've been chasing this goal for 13 years," said Jose Dirceu, the president of Lula's Workers' Party, or PT.

"It's a great victory for democracy, but also for the PT and Lula, who persisted, who believed he would win this mandate from the Brazilian people."

Although Lula's admirers put him in the same league as Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela, his critics have compared him to leftist "villains" like Cuba's Fidel Castro and Venezuela's populist president, Hugo Chavez.

From Sao Paulo to Wall Street, investors hammered Brazil's financial markets all year, worried that Lula - who dropped out of elementary school and has never held an administrative post - would mismanage the world's ninth-largest economy and its delicately balanced $260 billion public debt.

But, slowly, Lula has been winning them over. Gone is the fiery talk of renegotiating foreign debt that made bankers tremble. He has instead pledged to follow sound economic policies and even toe the line on a $30 billion International Monetary Fund aid package.

He has sewn up alliances with old enemies and enlisted a conservative textile magnate as his vice president. Business leaders have joined his camp, and markets rallied this week.

It's all part of what the 57-year-old father of five calls his "peace and love" approach.

But with such disparate forces behind him, Lula faces the hard task of creating consensus to enact his reforms to stabilise Brazil's shaky economy and restart stagnant growth.

For all his changes, however, the vast, working majority of Brazil's 170 million people can still identify with Lula, who speaks with a lisp and lost his pinky while operating a lathe.

Aguinaldo Barbosa da Silva, 32, says he sees eye to eye with the future president.

"What have I got? A (Volkswagen) Beetle in the garage, a 700 reais ($190) a month salary, three kids," he says, drinking beer amid the celebration on Sao Paulo's main Paulista Avenue.

"I'm here because I'm people, and Lula is people."