Brazil’s ex-president Luiz Inacio ‘Lula’ da Silva has been named as his party’s candidate for upcoming presidential elections, despite the fact that the former leader is currently serving a 12-year prison sentence for graft.
Tens of thousands of Lula’s supporters marched throught the streets of the capital Brasilia on Wednesday as the Workers’ Party formally registered his application to run in the October elections, Bloomberg reports.
Party president Gleisi Hoffman addressed the crowd of supporters - many of whom had travelled across the country in a show of solidarity with Lula - saying: “President, thank you for your trust and for the trust of the Brazilian people. You are our candidate now, Lula.”
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Fernando Haddad, the former mayor of Sao Paulo named as Lula’s running mate, read a message from the imprisoned politician to the crowd. “I will only not be a candidate if I die, give up or am ripped from the race by electoral authorities,” it read. “I don’t expect to die. I will not give up.”
A former steel worker and union boss, Lula served as President of Brazil from 2003 to 2011, but was jailed for 12 years in April on charges of corruption and money laundering. He and his supporters has consistently denied any wrongdoing in the legal case that saw him imprisoned.
Under the country’s “clean slate” law, any “candidate convicted of a criminal offense, upheld on appeal, cannot stand for public office for eight years”, says Bloomberg.
The BBC reports that Brazil’s prosecutor general has “immediately filed to invalidate his candidacy”.
Despite his conviction, opinion polls in the country reportedly show “around one third of Brazilians would back Lula if he were allowed to run”, the BBC says, which would “make him the front-runner in October's vote”.
“People thought Lula would not survive in the polls and the opposite is the case. He is still the front-runner in all scenarios and would win outright in some of them,” Haddad told reporters. “If the people want to vote for him they should have the right to do so.”
Lula “left office with a record approval rating of 87% due to a booming economy and social programs that lifted millions of Brazilians from poverty”, Reuters reports, and his popularity has remained untarnished by his conviction.
If Lula is barred from the elections - which The Guardian suggests will almost certainly happen - Haddad is expected to take his place. Manuela D’Avila, a communist party legislator, will then become Haddad’s vice presidential candidate.
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