Why Lula Should Be Allowed to Run for President
MEXICO CITY — Brazil will hold a presidential election on Oct. 7, its eighth since the return of democracy in 1985. It represents a fundamental clash between democracy and the rule of law, between free and fair elections and due process. Part of this contradiction was explained recently by Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the former Brazilian president and aspiring candidate universally known as Lula, who registered his candidacy from jail on Aug. 15.
The convoluted Brazilian electoral and judicial system is expected to decide in the coming days whether to admit his candidacy or, more likely, to bar him from running. This would be a mistake. Having Lula on the ballot will strengthen democracy in Brazil; the latter is a necessary, though not sufficient, condition for the rule of law.
Mr. da Silva’s supporters and he have argued that he leads in the polls; that he is being barred from running because of a relatively minor corruption charge, based on confessions obtained through plea bargaining, which he and many jurists dispute; and that the Brazilian judicial system, thanks to a series of anti-corruption laws against the ineffectiveness of existing regulations, has become the arbiter of the country’s elections.
His opponents, together with the judges who have sentenced him to 12 years in jail, as well as part of the Brazilian media, insist on the substance of the matter, not the process itself. According to them, Lula was convicted of corruption, minor or not, and lost his appeal to the Supreme Court to remain under house arrest until all of his trials conclude. In addition, they stress, he is still being tried on six other charges, even though the full appeals process on the first count has not yet run its course. Last, there is a so-called clean-slate law in Brazil, signed by the then-president Lula himself, stipulating that anyone convicted of corruption cannot run for office. So either because he is in prison or because he was convicted of corruption, he will almost certainly not be on the ballot.
Lula’s supporters respond that one of the judges involved, Sergio Moro, is conducting a political vendetta against him and the party he helped found nearly 40 years ago. They also claim that the beachfront apartment supposedly given to him by a construction company he arranged contracts for is neither his nor his deceased wife’s. His adversaries reply that Lula is not being singled out and that he shouldn’t enjoy any special privilege simply because he is popular, or was president or wishes to run for office.
There is no good solution to this dilemma, especially in a country that has a terribly discredited political elite and is barely emerging from the worst economic recession in decades. Jair Bolsonaro, an extreme right-wing candidate, apparently advised, among others, by Steve Bannon, is running second to Lula in the polls. He appeals to the racist, homophobic and sexist streaks always present in Brazilian society and to a growing anti-establishment feeling. Clearly, Mr. Bolsonaro is a greater threat to democracy in Brazil than Mr. da Silva’s excesses, were they all to be confirmed.
Allowing Lula to run would placate his backers, who are many, but severely weaken the sense that after almost two centuries of privilege, corruption, the absence of equal laws for everybody and the fall of the high and mighty, Brazil was finally entering modernity in a domain where the country and its neighbors have always fared worst: the rule of law. But denying tens of millions of Lula’s constituents the possibility of voting their idol back into the Planalto presidential palace would almost imply disenfranchising them.
Mr. da Silva’s cause has been endorsed by international figures across the globe. More than a dozen members of the United States Congress, including Senator Bernie Sanders, recently wrote a letter to the Brazilian ambassador in Washington. They demanded that Lula be freed while his appeals process is underway and condemned the use of the fight against corruption as a tool to persecute opposition politicians. Pope Francis received a small group of Brazilian, Argentine and Chilean friends of Lula a few days ago and listened closely to their complaints.
While Lula insists his only option lies in his own candidacy, his Workers’ Party, or PT, has a Plan B. In this scenario, the former mayor of São Paulo and current vice-presidential candidate Fernando Haddad would end up on the ballot if Lula’s protests, legal recourse and international campaign efforts prove futile. In case the ex-union leader is able to transfer enough of his votes to his replacement, he may win in a runoff election scheduled for Oct. 28. If the transfer doesn’t quite work out, however, and the PT is denied victory one way or another, the challenges for Brazil may be overwhelming.
An additional complication arises from the regional context in which this drama is being played out. In several Latin American nations, incumbents’ bans on opponents running for office have become a pattern. In Nicaragua in 2016, Daniel Ortega struck down or intimidated a sufficient numbers of rivals — especially the strongest one, Eduardo Montealegre — to finally win with 72 percent of the vote, virtually uncontested. In Venezuela this year, Nicolás Maduro made sure that the main opposition contenders, Henrique Capriles and Leopoldo López, were unable to run. Only a semi-sham candidate opposed Mr. Maduro.
In other countries, attempts at discouraging or prohibiting candidates from being on the ballot have also occurred. They range from the Mexican opposition leader Andrés Manuel López Obrador in 2005 (he was finally elected in July) to several Guatemalan candidates barred by corruption charges, anti-nepotism clauses and human rights violations.
As in Brazil, many of these cases — not all, obviously — are tricky. Some contenders are disqualified for valid reasons, or at least lawful ones. Others are unquestionable victims of political persecution. It is hard to dispute the notion that Lula’s case tends to fall into the Venezuelan and Nicaraguan categories, rather than the others. Except that Brazilian democracy is not collapsing, demonstrators are not being murdered in the streets, students are not being jailed, and the media is not muzzled. As The Economist regretted a few months back, there may be government by judges in Brazil, but not a dictatorship.
In the end, though I believe that the Lava Jato scandal, as well as the diligence of judges like Mr. Moro, have served Brazil and Latin America well, I prefer to see Lula on the ballot than in jail.
The charges brought against him are too flimsy, the purported crime so petty (until now), the sentence so brazenly disproportionate and the stakes so high that in Latin America today, democracy should trump — so to speak — the rule of law. In an ideal world, the two go together and certainly do not clash with each other. In Brazil, they do. I’ll go with democracy, warts and all.
Jorge G. Castañeda, foreign minister of Mexico from 2000 to 2003, is a professor at New York University and a contributing opinion writer.