Politician convicted of corruption, disqualified becomes Brazil president for third time

KARACHI: Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has become the President of Brazil after defeating Jair Bolsonaro, the incumbent, who is called the “Donald Trump” of Latin America by experts. He will take oath as the 39th President of the country on January 1, 2023.

He will become the first President of Brazil to be elected thrice and the second to be elected for the second consecutive term. At 77, he will be the oldest leader of the country. Lula served two terms as the 35th president between 2003 and 2010. He was also treated for throat cancer in 2011. In 2017, federal prosecutors implicated the former President in their investigation of a vast corruption scheme that they said had taken root during his administration.

Lula was sentenced to nearly 10 years in prison for accepting a luxury apartment as a bribe—a charge he has always dismissed as a politically-motivated attack. The judge who convicted him would later go on to serve as Bolsonaro’s justice minister. In 2021, Brazil’s Supreme Court overruled Lula’s conviction, saying his right to a fair trial had been compromised—a ruling later agreed with by the UN’s human rights council—clearing him to run for re-election against Bolsonaro in 2022.

Brazil’s president is elected directly by the people; any candidate with more than 50% of the vote wins, and there is no role in the election for parliament and no electoral college. A first round was held on Sunday 2 October, with 11 candidates. Because no single candidate won more than 50% of the vote, the leading two candidates were put through to a run-off.

The former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, known as Lula, led with 48.4% of ballots. Lula is a leftist from the Workers’ party. The second-placed candidate in the first round was the incumbent president, Jair Bolsonaro, a rightwing populist.

He secured 43% of the vote, which was more than pollsters had predicted. Because the largest municipalities are often the last to declare, early results can be misleading. In the first round, Lula’s support was strongest in the north and east of the country, and Bolsonaro’s in the south. The state of Minas Gerais is often held to be a bellwether.

The result should mark an end to a bruising and deeply polarizing election year. Instead, it plunges this country of 200 million people into a tense wait to see how Bolsonaro will respond. The president, a former army captain, has spent the past year indicating that he would not accept a loss at these elections. His campaign has repeatedly claimed, without evidence, that Brazil’s electronic voting system is vulnerable to fraud—in a widely-remarked echo of former US president Donald Trump’s rhetoric in the run-up to the 2020 election.

Many analysts ahead of Sunday’s ballot had warned of the possibility of a Brazilian version of the Jan 6 Capitol insurrection, and indeed, after the result, some Bolsonaro supporters began to denounce Lula’s victory as fraudulent, and call for military intervention.

But more than 12 hours after Lula’s victory was confirmed by Brazil’s election authorities, neither Bolsonaro, nor his campaign staff, nor his politician sons had commented on the result, or addressed supporters.

However, several key allies of the president, including the speaker of the lower house of Brazil’s Congress, have recognized the result and called for democracy to be respected on Sunday night. That leaves Bolsonaro and his closest aides looking increasingly isolated.

World leaders, including US President Joe Biden and the presidents of all of Brazil’s South American neighbors, rushed to deliver their congratulations to Lula within hours of the result, piling pressure on Bolsonaro not to challenge the result.

In his victory speech on Sunday night, Lula struck a conciliatory note, aiming to heal political divisions deepened by the polarizing months-long contest that ended in his victory in Sunday’s run-off contest, four weeks after the first round of voting on Oct 2.

“As of January 1, 2023, I will govern for 215 million Brazilians and not just for those who voted for me,” he said. “There are not two Brazils. We are one country, one people, and one great nation.”

Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, meanwhile, extended felicitations to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva on his election as Brazilian president.“I wish him great success and look forward to working with him to enhance bilateral relations between our two countries,” the prime minister, posted on his Twitter handle.Shehbaz Sharif mentioned that he and the new Brazilian president shared a “consensus on the dangers of climate change”.