It looks like Lula will not be on the ballot in October
The popular but controversial ex-president of Brazil was nominated as the Workers’ Party candidate for the October elections, but he is ineligible as a candidate under Brazilian law, says the country’s electoral court.
Hi everyone, I’m Jeff, and welcome to Plain English, a podcast in English for everyone who is still learning. We go nice and slow here so you can catch every word. Today is Thursday, September 6, 2018, and this is Episode 83. That means you can find a transcript of today’s program at PlainEnglish.com/83. And like all our transcripts, it has instant translations of the most difficult words and phrases from English to Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, Italian, Chinese, and French. For every episode, the producer, JR, and I select about 100 words and phrases, expressions, to highlight—literally, we highlight them in red on the web site, and provide the translations into all those languages. If you are new to the program—and there are lots of new listeners, let me tell you—if you’re one of the many new listeners, make sure you check out PlainEnglish.com/83 and have a look at the translations.
Later on in today’s episode, I’ll explain what the English expression “in a bind” means. To be in a bind. Listen for that in the first part of the program and we’ll talk more about it in the second half.
Lula will not be on Brazil’s presidential ballot
Brazil’s 72-year-old ex-president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who is serving a jail sentence for corruption, will not be eligible to run for president this fall, Brazil’s top electoral court has ruled. The law in Brazil says that anyone who has been convicted of a crime cannot run for public office if that conviction has been upheld by an appeals court.
Although the ruling was expected, it did dramatically change a pivotal race in Latin America’s biggest country. Brazil is still reeling from the Operation Car Wash corruption investigation and its current president has little public support.
Lula was leading in the presidential preference polls until the most recent ruling, despite currently being in jail. He was convicted as part of the Operation Car Wash corruption investigation. He was found to have accepted a renovated beachfront apartment worth over $1 million by an engineering firm.
The justices on Brazil’s electoral court debated for several hours and six voted not to allow Lula to run, against just one in favor of allowing Lula’s candidacy. The judge who issued the decision in the case said that what was at stake is the equality of all citizens before the law and the Constitution. One justice said the decision was very simple. Lula, for his part, has always held that his conviction was politically-motivated. The Workers Party of Brazil, which Lula represented when he was president, said that it would fight for his candidacy by all possible means.
That leaves the Workers Party in a bit of a bind. The party nominated Lula to be its candidate in the October elections just last month when about 2,000 of the party’s officials selected him. And for good reason: presidential polls showed that he had about double the support of the next-nearest rivals for the presidency.
But now that he is officially ineligible to run, that majority of Brazilians will have to find a new candidate. The Workers Party has ten days to replace Lula as a candidate. The party is expected to nominate former Sao Paolo Mayor Fernando Haddad, who is the current candidate for vice president, but he doesn’t enjoy the same public support as the electric ex-president Lula does. Though Haddad has little name recognition across Brazil at this point, and enjoys only single-digit support, over 30 percent of Brazilians told pollsters that they would support any candidate that Lula endorsed. So the party’s next job is to transfer Lula’s wide support to their new candidate. However, they’ll have to get creative because the ex-president will not be allowed to appear in the television commercials given for free to presidential candidates.
In the absence of Lula, the race could shape up much differently as Brazilians’ support would be spread thinly among a larger number of candidates. In polls that exclude Lula as an option, Jair Bolsonaro, a far-right candidate, has the most support—but only from about 20 percent of the people. He has a record of saying controversial things, including some things about police violence and minorities that have turned off many voters. The other main candidate is Geraldo Alckmin, who is considered a more experienced, centrist candidate with market-friendly policies. Unfortunately, he is considered the party of the government, the establishment, which is associated with the current government and President Michel Temer, who is unpopular. But he does have a wide coalition of smaller parties behind him. He also has some momentum: Brazil gives free commercial airtime to politicians based on their parties’ representation in Congress, so Alckmin’s broad alliance gives him a large base of free commercial airtime to use to his advantage.
If Lula is not in the race, it looks like it will be a race between Alckmin and Bolsonaro. The election will take place on October 7; if no candidate wins 50 percent of the vote, then a runoff election will be on October 28.
Time to say hello to a couple of listeners. Assaka from Morroco wrote to say he understands everything—but just in case there’s something he doesn’t understand, he checks out the transcripts. That’s a good way to do it Assaka—and thanks for listening all the way from Africa. I also want to say hi to Paolo, who’s from Italy but is now living in Australia. And another hello to Adrián from Mexico City. He’s studying English at UNAM, the big university in Mexico City.
If you are interested in practicing a little more with each episode, you might want to sign up for the Plain English emails. Each Monday and Thursday I send out an email summary of the program. I also include the definition of one more word or phrase from the episode. And I include links to the English articles that I use to prepare the show. So if you learn about a topic on Plain English and you’d like to practice a little more with that same topic, you can click the links to read news articles in English. Today’s email features links to articles from the BBC and the Los Angeles Times, for example, which I used to research the recent court ruling against Lula’s candidacy. If that sounds like it would be of interest, just go to PlainEnglish.com/mail and enter your details.
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