Leftist hero Lula’s release from jail fires up Brazil’s weak opposition
The release from jail of Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, Brazil’s former Socialist president, has given a powerful boost to resurgent leftists all over Latin America.
Lula, as he is universally known, walked out of a police building in the southern city of Curitiba late on Friday night, local time, to be greeted by dozens of redshirted supporters chanting: ‘‘Lula, I love you!’’
He embraced his daughter, raised his fist to the sky and climbed onto a stage with his girlfriend. ‘‘They didn’t arrest a man,’’ said the standard-bearer of the Latin
American left and the president of Brazil from 2003 to 2010. ‘‘They tried to silence an idea. But ideas don’t disappear.’’
His release cut short a 12-year corruption sentence that barred him from running in the 2018 presidential election, which he had been tipped to win, opening the way for the landslide victory of Jair Bolsonaro, the ultranationalist who assumed office in January.
The reappearance of Lula, for long Brazil’s most popular politician, has fired up an opposition weakened by a series of corruption scandals.
‘‘We have big battles ahead of us and Lula is the best person to express our positions to the country,’’ said Humberto Costa, a senator from Lula’s Workers’ Party.
Lula was allowed out of prison after a ruling on Friday by the Supreme Court that defendants cannot be imprisoned before all their appeals are exhausted. The former president was jailed in April last year, the biggest scalp for prosecutors in the sprawling ‘‘Car Wash’’ investigations into crooked business deals.
He was convicted of receiving a four-bedroom beachfront flat in exchange for help winning contracts for the state oil company. He claimed he had bought the flat with his own money.
The normally voluble Bolsonaro remained silent but Carlos, one of his sons, a Rio de Janeiro city councillor, wrote on Twitter that ‘‘Brazil no longer accepts the high jinks of the bandits’’ of the left.
Lula has said that if freed he would travel around the country rallying opposition to Bolsonaro. On being free, he told supporters that he wanted to prove he had been wrongfully jailed.
‘‘If there is a criminal gang in this country, it is this bunch,’’ he said, referring to prosecutors and right-wing politicians whom he accused of pushing the case against him. – Sunday Times