Brazil: Lula da Silva, the phoenix that seeks to reconquer power

Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a former steelworker and shoe shiner in his childhood of misery in northeastern Brazil, faces a new challenge at the age of 76: to run for a third presidential term, against the current president Jair Bolsonaro.

Favorite in the polls, Lula, the most popular president in the history of Brazil and an icon of the left, announced his candidacy yesterday: “We are willing to work not only for electoral victory, but for the reconstruction and transformation of Brazil”, he claimed.

“It is a very special moment in my life, special for having you, for having managed for the first time to gather all the progressive political forces around my campaign”, Lula affirmed in a ceremony at a convention center in sao paulo, where hundreds of militants sheltered him.

The former president has joined all the progressive forces to his cause, with the aim of creating the widest possible front capable of confronting the right-wing and far-right parties that are with Bolsonaro, who will try to renew his mandate.

That coalition was presented yesterday under the name Let’s go together for Brazil.

With a huge Brazilian flag in the background, Lula, dressed in a suit but without a tie, made a speech in defense of the sovereignty of Brazil and the social drive during his command (2003-2010).

“We have a cause: to restore the sovereignty of Brazil,” said the former president, who added that the Bolsonaro government is dismantling it, “destroying the public policies of millions of Brazilians.”

In this Saturday’s act he participated virtually, after testing positive for coronavirus, the former governor of Sao Paulo Geraldo Alckmin, a veteran liberal politician, a fervent Catholic and who will be the vice-presidential candidate of Lula’s ticket.

The election of Alckmin, who was Lula’s opponent in the 2006 elections, is a turn to the center of Lula and a gesture to show an image of economic moderation.

“We are going to prove that the economy and social justice are not opposite things,” he said.

Lula’s candidacy had been given as a fact for months, but only this Saturday did he run as a candidate for the Presidency from Brazil.

Lula, leader of the Workers’ Party (PT), returns to the ring after being convicted of corruption, imprisoned for a year and a half and disqualified from running for the 2018 presidential elections.

In March 2021 he recovered his Rights politicians after the annulment of their convictions by the Supreme Court, which allows him to attempt a new assault on the presidency, 12 years after leaving power with 87% support.

Lula was involved in Lava Jato, the largest anti-corruption operation in the country’s history, about a gigantic network of bribes around the state oil company Petrobras.

The anti-corruption judge Sergio Moro sentenced him in 2017 to nine and a half years in prison for obtaining a triplex on the beachfront from a construction company in exchange for public contracts.

He was imprisoned in April 2018 for corruption and money laundering, after a media entrenchment in the Metalworkers Union in Sao Bernardo do Campo.

But he did not lose influence in the party or in the politics Although the scandal caused him to become a leader repudiated by a large part of the population.

Lula has always declared himself innocent and considers himself the victim of a political conspiracy to favor the far-right Bolsonaro, who used him as a scarecrow to win the support of the middle classes and win in 2018 with an anti-corruption speech.

A thesis that gained strength when Bolsonaro, barely elected, appointed Moro Minister of Justice.

Finally, Lula was released in November 2019.

Goal. “We want to unite democrats of all shades, from the most varied trajectories, of all classes and creeds,” Lula said.

Change. “When Lula extended his hand to me, I saw in that gesture much more than a sign of reconciliation between two historical adversaries, I saw a call to reason,” he said. Alckmin in a video.

Source-larepublica.pe