by Luis Miguel, The New American:
No matter which continent leftists are on, they play according to the same handbook.
The recent court ruling banning former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro from seeking public office for eight years has strong parallels to the strategy Democrats are currently using against Donald Trump, and should serve as a warning of what will happen if conservatives do not dismantle the communist Deep State while they are in power and able to do so.
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On Friday, a seven-judge panel in Brazil prohibited Bolsonaro, the controversial leader of the center-right Liberal Party, from running for office until 2030, thereby killing his chances of a 2026 challenge to left-wing President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva of the left-wing Workers’ Party, to whom Bolsonaro lost in 2022 by the narrowest margin in decades.
The 2022 race was a divisive one. Bolsonaro claimed the election system was compromised by hackers and that voting machines automatically filled out ballots for the Workers’ Party. In July 2022, Bolsonaro held a meeting, which included foreign ambassadors, at which he repeated his claims of voter fraud.
These allegations prompted another left-wing party, the Democratic Labor Party (PDT), to file a lawsuit against Bolsonaro. The party called on the Superior Electoral Tribunal (TSE) to ban Bolsonaro from running again, which the court did on Friday.
“This is an injustice against me, my God in heaven! Show me something concrete I have done against democracy. Perhaps my crime was doing the right thing for four years,” Bolsonaro said of TSE’s deliberations. He said he will appeal the decision. But even if he succeeds, there are currently 15 more cases against him pending at the TSE, and any one of them could result in another ban.
Ironically, Lula was himself banned after a conviction for taking bribes in 2017. But his conviction was annulled by Brazil’s Supreme Court in March 2021, allowing him to successfully run against Bolsonaro and stage his own political comeback, returning to the presidency 12 years after having left the office.
It should be noted that Lula (who served prison time for his bribery charges) was never cleared of wrongdoing; the Supreme Court merely held that the court that tried his case did not have jurisdiction. He could therefore be convicted again. As BBC notes:
[Supreme Court Justice Edson] Fachin agreed with Lula’s lawyers that the court located in the city of Curitiba, in Paraná state, should not have tried Lula because the crimes he was accused of did not take place in that state.
At the time of the alleged crimes, Lula was president and resided in the capital, Brasilia. Justice Fachin said the cases against him should therefore be handled by a court in that city.
He annulled four corruption cases against Lula and ordered they be retried in Brasilia.
Despite Lula’s lawyers saying the decision was a vindication “of his innocence”, Mr Fachin did not make any kind of ruling on whether the former president was guilty or not of the corruption charges.
The similarities between the ordeals of Trump and Bolsonaro are uncanny. Both men were heavily demonized by the leftist establishment media with epithets such as “fascist” and “far-right.”
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