Political rivals in Brazil face a common threat

The New York Times

RIODE JANEIRO — It was anythingbut a surrender.

At times jovial and defiant, the former president of Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, stood before a crowd of cheering supporters, painting himself as the victim of a deceitful judiciary that had wandered dangerouslyinto politics.

“If they think that with this sentence they will take me out of the game, let them know that I’m in the game,” Mr. da Silva said on Thursday, a day afterhis conviction on corruption and money laundering charges threatened his bid for athird presidency.

Corruptioninvestigations have discredited virtually every powerful political force in Brazil, upending the country before presidential elections next year.

Now political adversaries on very different sides of the ideological spectrum are relying on the same survival strategy: attacking the legitimacy ofprosecutors and judges who have set out to dismantle the cultureof corruption that Brazilian politicians have institutionalizedover decades.

The ruling against Mr. da Silva, one of Latin America’s most lionized and influential politicians, is the biggest conviction in a battle between the political class and a corps of judges and prosecutors — many of them in their 20s, 30s and 40s — who have dashed the impunity that elected officials have enjoyed for years.

On one side of the fight are veteran politicians like Mr. da Silva and the current president, Michel Temer, who faces the possibility of being ousted from office and sent to prison on corruption charges.

The two men, both in their 70s, are bitter political rivals who spent decades rising and falling in the highly fractured Brazilian party system, where fickle alliances are often sealed in back-room dealings and secret payoffs.

Standing against them are prosecutors and judges who argue that they are championing a more responsive vision of government. Preaching transparency, they are active on social media, openly encouraging Brazilians to make a united stand against graft.

“The faith in the political class is weakening, and this brings about a sense of confidence in the judiciary,” said Alan Mansur, the head of Brazil’s National Association of Prosecutors.

Dozens of lawmakers have been indicted or investigated in the past few years, for a range of crimes that include accepting unlawful campaign funds, soliciting bribes and laundering money.

And public opinion polls have shown that an overwhelming majority of Brazilians support the investigations rattling the political class. An Ipsos poll released in January found that 96 percent of respondents supported allowing the sweeping investigations that have caught up many political figures to continue “to the end, regardless of the outcome.”

Sergio Moro, 44, the judge who convicted Mr. da Silva, has become the most prominent figure in the crusade against corruption. Saying that he took no pleasure in sentencing a former president to almost 10 years in prison, Judge Moro invoked a saying by the 17th-century English historian Thomas Fuller to underscore the ruling: “Be you never so high the law is above you,” he wrote.

As the corruption cases overseen by Judge Moro have ensnarled an evergrowing class of powerful Brazilians, the judge has become something of a folk hero in the country. And in legal circles abroad, he is sometimes hailed as a transformational force for Brazil.

But Mr. da Silva, who helped lift millions out of poverty as president from 2003 to 2010 and still commands the loyalty of many Brazilians, argues that judges and prosecutors are pursuing him in court because they do not have the support to beat him at the ballot box.

The theme of unfair judicial interference has given staunch political rivals common ground.

After Mr. da Silva’s conviction, Mr. Temer’s lawyer, Antonio Cláudio Mariz de Oliveira, told reporters that the two veteran politicians were being targeted by prosecutors who were accusing “innocent people” and “destroying reputations” with “hasty allegations.”

Prosecutors and judges reject the claims that they are acting as political kingmakers, not unbiased defenders of the law.