Brazil is now back in court: Lula celebrates his victory, but the battle shifts to the judges

Sunday night’s huge Lula-supporting celebration is not merely the unbridled enthusiasm of half of Brazil celebrating the defeat of the other half. The epic story of the great comeback – the ‘virada histórica’ – of Lula da Silva, who has managed to secure re-election as president, is a valuable asset for him to deploy in the propaganda war of his new term. It will be a gruelling battle. It will be fought immediately in the courts. Not only, and not so much, because of the challenge to the election result announced by the far right supporting the defeated Flávio Bolsonaro, who are already said to be planning to flee to the United States to escape arrest warrants. Rather, it will stem from the highly likely impeachment motion against several Supreme Court justices—considered enemies even by the non-extreme right—starting with the Court’s president, Alexandre de Moraes, to be brought by the Brazilian Senate, where Bolsonaro’s supporters can count on a large majority.

Bolsonaro says he will challenge the court’s decision to extend the opening of polling stations for electronic voting by two hours. It is a dead end. He himself had requested the extension because turnout in the early afternoon was still low in the south-east, a right-wing stronghold, citing heavy rain that he claimed had slowed down journeys to polling stations. However, this is a very weak argument: during those two extra hours, only 33,000 people voted, and Lula won by a margin of 4.4 million votes. The extension had no impact on the result.

Reviving the mythical aura surrounding Lula through the new, astonishing feats of the trade unionist and founder of the Partido dos Trabalhadores (never in Brazil’s history has a candidate defeated in the first round of the presidential election gone on to win the run-off; never has anyone been elected president four times) serves to lay the groundwork for the propaganda of the ‘workers’ president’ capable of rising from the ashes, propaganda with which to face the hand-to-hand battle that now lies ahead for the Partido dos Trabalhadores.

Voters gave Lula just over 64.2 million votes (51.79 per cent of the total vote), a margin that would have been unthinkable just twenty days ago against Flávio Bolsonaro (48.21 per cent of the total vote), who had emerged ahead after the first round. Lula managed to win back votes in every state, even in those historically hostile to him and firmly on the right, such as Paraná, the stronghold now governed by his true arch-enemy, Sergio Moro, who, as a trial judge, had him arrested live on television whilst he was the favourite candidate in the 2018 elections – elections subsequently won, unopposed, by Jair Bolsonaro, who, upon his election, appointed Moro himself as super-minister of justice in the most right-wing government since the end of the military dictatorship.

Lula’s latest triumph on Sunday – his outstanding performance, a sort of Olympic gold medal celebrated on Avenida Paulista with such jubilation as is rarely seen even on Carnival Saturday – is the fuel his party needs to power the political communications machine with which it must weather the trench warfare in the Senate and wherever else the right wing might attempt to concoct a legal case against him.

The first crusade, as previously announced, will be directed against Alexandre de Moraes, who, as head of the Supreme Court, secured the arrest of Jair Bolsonaro for the assault on Parliament and the Supreme Court in 2023. The reason why Flávio, the son, stood as a candidate for the Bolsonaro clan in the elections rather than his father Jair is that de Moraes’s investigation led to the former president being sentenced to 27 years’ imprisonment for attempted coup.

Many pro-Bolsonaro senatorial candidates, who were subsequently elected, built their entire campaigns on the promise of ousting the much-hated Alexandre de Moraes from the Supreme Court (more or less: vote for me and I’ll impeach the judge who had our ‘gun-toting’ president convicted). This clash—which will play out in instalments on the evening news programmes watched by millions, just as the duel between ‘sheriff-judge’ Sergio Moro and the defendant Lula did—is framed by the battles the PT will attempt to win against the right-wing Supreme Court judges, who are in turn branded as enemies.

In Brazil, where an entire political and business class has been decapitated over the last fifteen years through the courts, and where the ‘Great Survivor’ – who narrowly escaped the axe of the trials – has returned to the presidency for the fourth incredible time, the judges will once again hold the reins of these dramatic twists and turns for the next four years.