On Wednesday, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who served as the President of
Brazil from 2003 to 2011, was convicted of corruption and money
laundering. The case against him grew out of a long-running federal
bribery investigation, known as Operation Car Wash, that has sent some
of Brazil’s richest and most powerful people to prison—but Lula was the
most significant figure to fall yet.

The judge who decided the case, Sérgio Moro, clearly understood the
gravity of the situation. He sentenced Lula to nine and a half years in
prison but, in deference to the national “trauma” involved in jailing a
former President, allowed him to remain free during his appeal. Yet Moro
was unambiguous about his conclusion that Lula had taken kickbacks while
in office. In his written decision, he described the scheme uncovered by
Operation Car Wash: the state oil company, Petrobras, had awarded
contracts to construction firms, which then funnelled some of the money
to lawmakers in Lula’s coalition. Lula’s precise role in the execution
of the scheme remains unclear, but one of the firms involved, OAS, was
found to have secretly given him a beachside apartment worth more than
seven hundred thousand dollars. More details are sure to come out: Lula
faces four additional trials for charges including corruption, influence
peddling, and obstruction of justice.

After receiving his sentence, Lula was defiant. On Thursday morning, he
held a press conference at the Workers’ Party headquarters in São Paulo.
He railed against Moro, whose two-hundred-and-sixty-page ruling, he
said, showed “absolutely no proof” of his guilt. Before the verdict,
Lula had been—despite his legal troubles—leading the country’s 2018
Presidential election polls, and now he vowed to run. “Anyone who thinks
this is the end of Lula is going to be disappointed,” he said, in a
voice that has been made gravelly by decades of smoking and a bout of
throat cancer. “Wait for me, because no one can decree my end but the
Brazilian people.”

Lula’s enduring appeal stems in part from the economic boom he oversaw
during his term as President, when thirty million people in Brazil were
lifted out of extreme poverty. At the time, many Brazilians allowed
themselves to dream that the country might finally see widespread
prosperity. And working-class Brazilians identified with his biography:
he was the first President of Brazil to grow up poor. Instead of
attending school, he sold peanuts and shined shoes. At fourteen, he got
a job at an auto-parts factory in São Paulo, where he lost his left
pinky in a machine. He gained national fame in the seventies when, as a
young union leader, he called for the first major workers strikes in
defiance of the military dictatorship. He never lost his lisp, even
after being elected to Congress in the eighties. To the country’s
workers, he was more like them than any politician they had seen
before—a squat man who drank cachaça.

Lula ran for President three times before winning the 2002 election. In
his campaigns, he promised to fight the corruption that helped keep
Brazil’s élites rich and its workers poor. Once in office, however, he
decided not to confront the old system head on. To pass his progressive
agenda, he decided to work within the system, building alliances with
old-school politicians who, even if they had once supported the
business-friendly dictatorship, put patronage over ideology. In the
venerable Brazilian tradition, Lula’s Workers’ Party dangled government contracts to win campaign
donations from wealthy families, and not every donation was declared to
the authorities. With these trade-offs, Lula lived up to an old
Brazilian saying, “rouba mas faz”—“he steals, but he gets things
done.”

One thing that every Brazilian knows is that while Lula is the country’s
first President to be convicted of corruption, he is almost certainly
not the first to have committed it. The difference is that, in the past,
Brazilian politicians could quash any investigation that threatened
them. The irony of Lula’s downfall is that, while his Administration was
siphoning billions of dollars from public coffers, it was also allowing
an independent judiciary to flourish. That independence led to the
investigation—Operation Car Wash—that would eventually ensnare him.

There were many in Brazil who celebrated Lula’s conviction. They
believed him to be uniquely corrupt, and blamed the Workers’ Party for
the country’s current economic ills. His supporters, however, were not
shy in expressing their dismay. Union leaders and left-wing politicians
called for protests against what they consider to be a political
persecution, part of a right-wing conspiracy to bury Lula’s chances of
returning to the Presidency. “This is not democracy,” Lindbergh Farias,
a senator from the Workers’ Party, declared in a video on his Facebook
page.

The problem with this theory is that Operation Car Wash has also
targeted right-wing politicians. The current President, Michel Temer, who helped to orchestrate the impeachment of Lula’s successor, Dilma
Rousseff, is one of several top conservative figures facing charges of
corruption. (He has denied the charges). In fact, powerful politicians
on both the right and the left have begun to quietly unite against
Operation Car Wash. Behind the scenes, the Workers’ Party has reportedly
worked with Temer’s party toward two common goals: amnesty for
politicians who took undeclared campaign donations, and restrictions on
the power of prosecutors. Last month, Lula even defended Temer publicly,
accusing the country’s prosecutor general of “pyrotechnics” and saying
that he should be punished if his allegations are disproved.

In his ruling, Moro cited the seventeenth-century English writer Thomas
Fuller: “Be you never so high, the law is above you.” This is a very new
concept in Brazil. In recent weeks, Temer has made drastic cuts to the
federal police budget, and the main task force behind Operation Car Wash
was shut down—even though ninety-five per cent of Brazilians want the
investigation to keep going. This is a contest that defies ideological
categories, pitting most of the political class against the public. Lula
helped millions of the country’s poor, but to side with him now would
risk undermining the fight against impunity.