Frida Ghitis
The court ruling, which still faces possible challenges, sets the stage for an extraordinarily divisive election next year, with two personalities whose political views are polar opposites and who each inspire their own passionate supporters. Brazil has spent years in the grip of political acrimony, and the next election is all but certain to make it much worse.
The conventional wisdom is that the presence of Lula and Bolsonaro on the ballot all but forecloses the possibility that a centrist candidate could emerge victorious. But the conventional wisdom could be wrong. Brazilian voters, not unlike those in the United States, are exhausted from headline-grabbing, outrage-inducing, family-splitting political leaders. Just as the long-time centrist Joe Biden might have seemed too moderate and too low-key to take on Donald Trump last year, the appeal of a calm, steady hand during a time of crisis in Brazil could yet surprise the pundits.
Lula, who served as president from 2003 to 2010 and won both of his elections in a runoff, has faced a series of corruption cases since leaving office. He spent nearly 20 months of a 12-year sentence in prison until he was freed in November 2019 by a Supreme Court ruling that said defendants could only be imprisoned after all their appeals to higher courts had been exhausted. But the ruling still left him ineligible to run for political office again.
On Monday, Supreme Court Justice Edson Fachin ruled on a technical issue, saying that the cases against the former president should not have been tried in the city of Curitiba, where the anti-corruption task force that investigated Lula was based. With that, the judge threw out the convictions, although it was not an acquittal. But it was a political bombshell that triggered euphoria among Lula’s millions of supporters.
Lula still faces other corruption cases, and Brazil’s attorney general said he wants a ruling by the full Supreme Court on Fachin’s decision. But Lula’s legal troubles may be finally coming to an end.
The prosecution, which supporters always claimed was politically motivated, has been tainted by revelations of wrongdoing during the epic anti-corruption case known as “Lava Jato,” or Car Wash, which ensnared hundreds of prominent Brazilians. The lead judge in the investigations, Sergio Moro, was once a national idol. He stepped down from the bench to become Bolsonaro’s justice minister before resigning in protest last April, when he accused Bolsonaro of corruption and of politicizing the Justice Ministry by trying to control graft investigations into his family. An investigation by The Intercept in 2019 found that, when Moro was a judge, he had improperly communicated with and guided prosecutors in the Car Wash investigations, including the prosecution of Lula.
Lula is seen by many as a principal victim of a political ploy. He remains enormously popular in some sectors of Brazilian society, who remember fondly the newfound prosperity, fueled by the 2000s-era commodities boom, that bathed much of the country during his presidency. Others remember the widespread corruption. Everyone has an opinion—a strong one.
For now, there is no strong centrist candidate capturing the imagination of Brazilians. But the next 19 months promise to be polarizing, perhaps creating a space for an alternative.
Lula’s personal story is remarkable. Once a shoe-shine boy who grew up in abject poverty, he became a labor leader and eventually head of the leftist Workers’ Party, or PT. His presidency was part of the so-called pink tide that swept Latin America in the early 2000s, but he became a more palatable and competent alternative to Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez.
Lula’s income redistribution programs brought millions of Brazilians out of poverty without the vitriolic, divisive Chavista rhetoric and agenda that later sank Venezuela. Brazil’s economy boomed, in large part because of a surge in the price of commodities exports, like it did in other countries. When the boom ended, the PT, by then beset by corruption charges, started losing altitude. The opposition became more aggressive, and Lula’s hand-picked successor, Dilma Rousseff, was impeached, accused of breaking an obscure budget law, and removed from office.
Bolsonaro, a brash former army captain, emerged as a Brazilian version of Trump. He relentlessly uttered offensive statements, mocking women, rape and homosexuality, and praising the country’s past dictatorship. Still, his decisive-sounding commitment to tackle corruption helped him win the presidency. On his watch, though, corruption has not disappeared.
But it is Bolsonaro’s grotesque mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic that has been most shocking. Like Trump, he rejected almost all sound advice, promoted a phony miracle drug in hydroxychloroquine, and caught the virus himself. Other Brazilian officials have struggled to establish a coherent response to COVID-19 in that leadership vacuum. The result is the second-highest COVID-19 death toll behind the United States, with more than 260,000 Brazilians dead and the health care system on the verge of collapse.
Paradoxically, Bolsonaro’s approval rating rose last year, as Brazilians started receiving direct basic income payments as part of pandemic assistance. But his approval is nosediving again. A February poll put it at 32.9 percent, down from 41.2 percent in October. With the election scheduled for October next year, Bolsonaro is making a new populist push, trying to take over the state-owned oil company, Petrobras, in order to lower fuel prices.
Surveys show Lula could beat Bolsonaro. A recent survey by the pollster IPEC found that 50 percent of Brazilians “would certainly” or “could” vote for Lula—many more than the 38 percent who said the same about Bolsonaro. Unquestionably, Lula poses the biggest political threat to Bolsonaro’s reelection. But despite the commonly held belief that only Lula can beat him, he was one of 10 potential candidates who outperformed him in that poll.
And Lula has other problems besides his still unresolved legal issues. He comes to the scene with heavy baggage. While half of those surveyed in the IPEC poll said they might vote for him, 44 percent said they would never support him. That’s not as bad as Bolsonaro; 56 percent of Brazilians said they would never support him. But it’s enough of a negative sentiment that it leaves an opening for a third option, especially during a time when real-life problems—rampant disease and economic collapse—have the power to overshadow ideology.
For now, there is no strong centrist candidate capturing the imagination of Brazilians. But the next 19 months promise to be painfully polarizing, perhaps creating a space for an alternative. Bolsonaro and Lula, well-known quantities who divide Brazil, have the lead, but they have no guarantee of success.
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