Lula Open to Backing Any Candidate Against Bolsonaro

Date: 20 September 2020 - 21:54

News ID: ۸۳۰۱۰

BRASILIA (Reuters) -- Brazil’s former leftist President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, barred from elected office due to corruption convictions, said he is open to backing any candidate who can beat far-right President Jair Bolsonaro in the 2022 elections.
"I am prepared to support any candidate who is committed to the working people of Brazil and against Bolsonaro,” Lula told Reuters on Friday in an interview via video conference.
Whether or not he himself runs in the next general election, Lula said depends on the courts. The former president has two criminal convictions for graft that bar him from running unless he is able to overturn them, plus five other indictments.
The charismatic former leader said his Workers Party, known as the PT, will support left and center-left parties in the November local elections to build opposition to Bolsonaro, who he accused of failing to lead Brazil out of its worst economic and public health crisis in the coronavirus pandemic.
Still one of Brazil’s most popular politicians, Lula - who governed Brazil from 2003-2010 - maintains that the corruption cases against him were politically motivated to stop him returning to power and said he hopes the graft sentences can be annulled by the courts as new evidence of bias by prosecutors emerges.
Lula is sure of his place in the history books for lifting millions out of poverty and he said there was no need for a mea culpa for misdeeds committed by his party.
If Lula were free to run and the election held today, he would tie with Bolsonaro in a runoff, a poll by Poder360 news portal found last week.
Lula, who will be 75 next month, left quarantine in his home in an industrial suburb of Sao Paulo on Thursday for the first times since March 12 to do routine medical exams that found him in good health.
On Monday, his party will launch a National Reconstruction Plan that will propose recovering Latin America’s largest economy from its worst slump with strong industrial investments and the creation of a new social welfare program that will guarantee low-income families a 600 reais a month stipend.
Lula was jailed in 2018 and spent 560 days behind bars until he was freed in November last year after the Supreme Court reversed a previous ruling on whether defendants should be imprisoned or not before all their appeals are exhausted. He faces six other corruption indictments.