RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Ex-President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva assures that he is open to endorse any candidate who can defeat President Jair Bolsonaro in the 2022 elections and in this year’s municipal disputes.
“I will be willing to support any candidate who has a commitment to the working people against Bolsonaro. They do not need to be PT candidates. Whether it is a candidate from the PDT, PCdoB, PSB, or PSOL in a dispute where the PT is not involved, the PT will have no doubt about endorsing any progressive candidate,” Lula said in a videoconference interview with Reuters on Friday.
Asked whether or not he himself will be able to stand in the next presidential elections, Lula says that it depends on the Courts. The ex-president has two criminal convictions for corruption that prevent him from running unless he succeeds in overturning them.
The ex-president said the PT will endorse left and center-left parties in November’s municipal elections to build an opposition to Bolsonaro, whom he accused of failing to lead Brazil during its worst economic and public health crisis in the coronavirus pandemic.
“Brazil is ungoverned, like an ocean liner in the open sea without a captain, because Bolsonaro only cares about telling things about himself through fake news, not bothering to take care of Brazil. The role of a president is to take care of his people. That means thinking about jobs, wages, health, eating three times a day”, he declared.
Lula says that the emergency aid has improved Bolsonaro’s approval, but this has a price and, when it ends in December, the current president will have to explain himself.
Still one of the country’s most popular politicians, after his 2003-2010 administration, Lula says that the corruption proceedings against him were politically motivated to prevent him from returning to power and hopes that the sentences can be overturned by the courts, as evidence of the prosecutors’ partiality emerges.
Lula is sure of his place in the history books for pulling millions out of poverty and said there is no need for a mea culpa for the irregularities committed by his party.
“Self-criticism is asked of the PT by people who have no criticism of the PT so that they will have a reason to criticize the PT,” he said.
“We certainly didn’t do everything we should have done, but we built the greatest policy of social inclusion in the history of this country. We had never taken so much care of the poor, the blacks, the indigenous peoples,” he added.
If Lula were free to run and the elections were held today, he would tie with Bolsonaro in a second round, according to a survey by PoderData, the research division of Poder360 online newspaper, which was completed last week.
The research showed that Lula leads among women, youths, and university-level voters, while Bolsonaro would win states in the agricultural belt, the Amazon, and even the Northeast, which was once Lula’s stronghold, but where Bolsonaro conquered ground with the emergency aid payments to families during the pandemic.
National Reconstruction
Lula, who will turn 75 next month, left quarantine on Thursday for the first time since March 12th for routine medical exams, which showed that he is in good health.
“God was generous to me not only in politics but also in health. I took all tests a human being who wants to live up to 120 years of age needs to take, everything is wonderfully well. I have the energy of a 30-year-old and a passion for politics of a 20-year-old,” he joked.
On Monday, the PT will launch a National Reconstruction Plan that will propose the economic rebound through major industrial investments and the creation of a new social assistance program that would provide low-income families with a R$600 monthly grant.
Lula was arrested in 2018 and spent 560 days in prison until he was released in November last year, after the Federal Supreme Court (STF) overturned the option to start serving the prison sentence after an appellate court affirms a conviction. The ex-president faces four other corruption charges.
“I am reassured. I don’t know what the courts will do. I only hope that justice will be done,” he said. “They’re dismantling the hoax that was Lava Jato.”
A candidate or not, Lula intends to lead his party and start traveling throughout Brazil as soon as the pandemic subsides.
What he wants most is to be judged not by the courts, but by the voters, in an election in which his party runs against Bolsonaro to improve the quality of life of poor Brazilians, particularly in the Northeast, his homeland.
“I would love to be judged by the Brazilian people again … We ended hunger in Brazil and hunger is back,” he said.
Source: Reuters