Brazil’s Electoral Court strips Bolsonaro of 80% of campaign time and gives it to Lula da Silva

The decision came from Judge Maria Claudia Bucchianeri, who ruled that Bolsonaro violated electoral law by telling the truth: that Lula is an ex-convict who has not been acquitted.

The Superior Electoral Court (TSE), composed of mostly left-leaning Supreme Court Justices, decided Wednesday to suspend Bolsonaro’s campaigning protocols and give them to Lula da Silva.

These protocols are provided to all presidential candidates for publication of their campaign spots on television, radio, and the Internet.

According to the TSE, the latest video released by Bolsonaro’s campaign, in which he recalls that former President Lula da Silva was not acquitted in his corruption trials, but that there was only a change of jurisdiction, violates Brazilian electoral law.

A message from the court appeared in the minutes of the Liberal Party (PL, right) on Wednesday, “This message is displayed to replace the program suspended for violation of electoral regulations.”

The decision also included the cancellation of almost 80% of the minutes allocated to Bolsonaro in the last week before the runoff.

However, these canceled minutes were not replaced by a message from the court, but were given to Lula da Silva’s campaign so that “the candidate of the Workers’ Party (PT, left) has the right to respond.”

Although each was allotted 225 minutes for the week of Oct. 20-28, Lula da Silva will have 395 minutes and Bolsonaro only 55 minutes.

The decision in da Silva’s favor comes at a time when Bolsonaro is tied with his opponent for the first time in most polls and, according to one poll, has even taken the lead so that his chances of winning are higher than ever before.

BOLSONARO MUST REMAIN SILENT; DA SILVA CAN TALK AS LONG AS HE LIKES

Starting Oct. 21, Bolsonaro’s 25 minutes per day will be reduced to just four, while da Silva will have 46 minutes per day.

The most questionable thing is that on Oct. 28, the last day of campaigning before the electoral ban, Bolsonaro will have only 3 minutes to publish his campaign spots in the audiovisual media, while da Silva will have 47 minutes.

Judge Maria Claudia Bucchianeri granted a request by the PT to withdraw 184 of Bolsonaro’s campaign spots that were scheduled to air on television this week, in which he spoke of da Silva’s imprisonment for corruption.

By the decision of Bucchianeri, a leftist activist who took over as deputy judge at the TSE this year, spots of former President Lula will be shown instead, giving him the “right” to respond to opposition campaign attacks.

Meanwhile, the Electoral Court has also announced the opening of an investigation into alleged disinformation by Carlos Bolsonaro, President Jair Bolsonaro’s son, a Rio de Janeiro councilman and head of his father’s communications strategy.

Inspector General Benedito Gonçalves will lead the investigation into Carlos Bolsonaro, who is responsible for suspending some of Bolsonaro’s ads on YouTube and even ordered the video company to suspend monetization of the videos of four content creators who openly advocate for Bolsonaro, even though they did not violate the company’s rules.

IMPRISONED FOR 580 DAYS

In 2017 Lula da Silva was sentenced by Judge Moro to nine years and six months in prison on charges of “passive corruption” and “money laundering”, expressed in the reservation to acquire a luxury apartment in São Paulo.

In addition, Lula da Silva was sentenced to two years and 11 months in prison for remodeling 2010 a house located in São Paulo with money from Odebrecht, charged with the crimes of active and passive corruption and money laundering.

These cases led the former President to be imprisoned in 2018.

Still, he only served 580 days of the sentence since the Brazilian Supreme Court, in an unusual decision, and with Justice Edson Fachín at the head, annulled in 2021 all the convictions established against Lula da Silva due to “technical-formal” criteria.

The pretext used was that the court that initially tried the former President – a court based in Curitiba (in the south of the country) – did not have jurisdiction to do so and that the trials had to start from scratch in a court in Brasília.

Beyond the judicial implications, the Supreme Court’s decision opened the door for Lula da Silva.

The Supreme Court had presided over Brazil amid the region’s most significant corporate corruption scandal in recent decades to be politically rehabilitated to run again as a presidential candidate.