Lula victim of the Car Wash
Brazil’s top electoral court has ruled ‘‘Lula’’ – former president Luiz Ina´ cio da Silva – cannot run in the presidential election in October. He served two terms as president, from 2003-2011, he dutifully waited out the following two terms, and his Workers’ Party has nominated him for the presidency again. Opinion polls give him 39 per cent support, more than twice as much as any other candidate. However, Lula is in jail, serving a 12-year sentence for corruption, and he is not getting out any time soon.
The bad news is that he is probably guilty – perhaps not of the specific offence he has already been convicted for, but of four other charges of money laundering, influence peddling and obstruction of justice still pending.
Lula’s conviction rests on little more than the word of an executive of a giant construction company who claims he gave Lula a penthouse apartment in a seaside resort town in return for a lucrative contract with the state-owned oil company Petrobras. The executive was facing corruption charges himself, and made the accusation as part of a plea bargain.
There are no documents linking Lula or his late wife to the house, nor is there any evidence they ever spent time there. This case went to trial only because it suggested that Lula had sold out for personal advantage. He probably didn’t.
But there is plenty of evidence Lula engaged in other kinds of dodgy fundraising, not to benefit himself, but to buy the co-operation of other parties in Brazil’s Congress, where there was a plethora of small parties and his Workers’ Party never had a majority. This was illegal, but it was perfectly normal political practice when he became president in 2003.
So Lula appointed Workers’ Party members to senior executive roles in Petrobras and other stateowned companies. They demanded kickbacks from companies that sought contracts with Petrobras and the others, and handed the money over to the Workers’ Party – which handed much of it on to smaller parties in Congress in return for their votes.
That’s how Lula pushed through radical measures like the ‘‘bolsa familial’’, a regular payment to poor Brazilians, provided their children had an 85 per cent attendance record at school and had received all their vaccinations that lifted 35 million people out of poverty. Brazil’s economy boomed, and when he left office in 2011 with an 83 per cent approval rating, Brazilians were both richer and more equal than ever before.
His chosen successor Dilma Rousseff won the election, but then world commodity prices collapsed, the Brazilian economy tanked, and unemployment soared. She squeaked back into office in the 2015 election, but was impeached in 2016 for misrepresenting the scale of the deficit..
Her vice-president Michel Temer, a deeply corrupt politician from another political party, has served out the rest of her term, but he will surely be arrested too if he loses the protection of holding a high political office. In fact, half the current members of Congress would be arrested if they lost their seats. The reason for that is a political cleansing operation called Lava Jato (Car Wash).
The irony for Lula is Car Wash owes its success to two key reforms of Rousseff’s government. One was to make evidence obtained through plea bargaining acceptable in the courts. The other was to appoint a truly independent attorney-general and independent judges and prosecutors – who duly sent Lula to jail.
So what happens now? The Workers’ Party has 10 days to substitute Fernando Haddad, Lula’s choice and a former mayor of Sao Paulo, as the Workers’ Party candidate for the presidency in the election on October 7, but it’s unlikely he can win all the votes that would have gone to Lula.
This may leave the road open for a dark-horse candidate like Jair Bolsonaro, a born-again wouldbe Donald Trump who disparages women, blacks and gays. The road to Hell, or at least somewhere quite unpleasant, is often paved with good intentions.
The scaremongers never take into account the beneficial aspects of alcohol, both social and economic.