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Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro, who is seeking re-election on Sunday, questioned on Monday that “the same judges who took socialist candidate Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva out of jail” are now in charge of the electoral process.
“The same judges who got Lula out of jail and made him eligible for election are exactly the same ones who are running the Brazilian electoral process,” Bolsonaro said in an interview with Record television last week ahead of the October 2 elections.
Bolsonaro thus linked the annulment of Lula’s convictions, decreed by the Supreme Court in 2021, with the decisions against him taken by the Superior Electoral Court, the body that organizes the elections and is partly composed of the same magistrates.
The Supreme Court overturned Lula’s two corruption convictions, for which he served 580 days in prison, due to “problems” of jurisdiction.
In his opinion, the judges “make it difficult” for the Ministry of Defence to participate as an observer of the electoral process, something that Bolsonaro believes prevents “avoiding the possibility of suspicion at the end of the elections.”
Bolsonaro assured that he will respect “without any problem” the result of a “clean election.”
However, the president said that he is the victim of “political persecution” by the electoral justice system for having prevented him from broadcasting on social networks from the presidential residence and using images of the official acts for the bicentenary of independence.
Brazil is holding the most polarised election in its recent history this Sunday, between Bolsonaro and former president Lula, who leads a coalition of ten left-wing parties.
