Lula victim of the Car Wash
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 would-be Donald Trump who disparages women, blacks and gays. The road to Hell, or at least somewhere quite unpleasant, is often paved with good intentions.
Gwynne Dyer’s new book is Growing Pains: The Future of Democracy (and Work).