This is the second installment of our two-part episode on the melancholic end of Operation Car Wash — the biggest anti-corruption effort ever seen in Brazil. In Part 1, we talked to political analyst Alex Hochuli about what Brazilians hoped Operation Car Wash would be — and what it really was. In Part 2, we discuss the Lula v. Jair Bolsonaro electoral faceoff, which now seems inevitable.
With his political rights reinstated, the former president (who ruled Brazil between 2003 and 2010) is the presumed candidate for his Workers’ Party in 2022. And many political experts believe he is the only one who can unseat incumbent Jair Bolsonaro — despite growing voter dissatisfaction with the uncontrolled pandemic and enhanced economic uncertainty.
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Background
- Alberto Carlos Almeida is a political scientist and author of The Brazilian Vote, a book which tries to understand how Brazilian voters think by analyzing electoral results and crossing that data with socioeconomic indicators.
Background reading:
- Why the Supreme Court quashed Lula’s convictions. And what’s next for the former president.
- Listen to Episode #85, in which historian André Pagliarini explains how Lula epitomizes the story of the Brazilian self-made man.
- Lula: from poverty, to the presidency, to prison.
- Jair Bolsonaro won the 2022 election thanks in part to his anti-corruption platform. But he oversaw the acrimonious end of Operation Car Wash, write editor-in-chief Gustavo Ribeiro and Brasília correspondent Renato Alves.
- The president has also tampered — or tried to tamper — with several other accountability institutions.
- Listen to Episode #64, about the Car Wash leaks — which proved that Mr. Moro didn’t act as a neutral umpire in the Car Wash proceedings, but rather as a coach for the prosecution.
- Operation Car Wash used “methods of torture,” one Supreme Court justice told The Brazilian Report, in an exclusive interview.
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