A part of Brazil still loves him and cries out for a judicial conspiracy but Lula is no longer eligible because yesterday he was sentenced to 12 years for corruption and can no longer rise to the top of the state.
The former worker president, in favor of whom ten thousand sympathizers took to the streets yesterday, will appeal but for now the Regional Court of Porto Alegre has ousted him from the presidential race, condemning him to an even heavier sentence than the one remedied in the first instance following of the Petrobras scandal.
For the Brazilian left and more generally in South America it is a real blow, but the judges were inflexible: "There is evidence - they argued - that the former president was one of the main architects, if not the main one", of a Corruption system created through the distribution of Petrobras contracts which involved bribes for the leaders of Lula's party, the PT.
However, the supporters of the former president are not giving up: today there is an extraordinary meeting of the PT management which will announce that Lula will run in any case in the next presidential elections. But the law forbids it and it is unlikely that the appeal to the judiciary that Lula will present will be able to put him back on track
