You won't have to pay out of your own pocket, Brazilian president Lula, but his clumsy accusation, repeated several times, cost the government a conviction for compensation for moral damages against the former president Jair Bolsonaro and his wife Michelle. This was established a few days ago by the Federal District Court, which quantified the check that the executive will have to issue in favor of the Bolsonaro family at 15 thousand reais (about 3 thousand euros), a paltry sum but with a strong symbolic meaning.
The disputed episode dates back to Lula's inauguration for his third term at the helm of Brazil, in January 2023, when the 78-year-old socialist leader, after narrowly beating the outgoing president in the elections at the end of 2022, had then publicly - and repeatedly - accused to have made disappear from the presidential residence of Palacio da Alvorada, in Brasilia, 83 pieces of furniture, thus appropriating public property. Not only that: the wife of the former metalworker unionist, the primeira-dama Janja da Silva, had added the burden, also contesting the state of the part of the furniture that had been left in its place. Indeed, as Bolsonaro has always maintained, having instructed his lawyers to sue, the president in office from 2019 to 2022 had decided, together with his wife, Primeira-Dama Michelle Reinaldo, to change the furniture of the government headquarters, replacing with personal furniture those proposed by the federal collection, which however were not stolen or hidden, but only transferred temporarily in a warehouse.
Bolsonaro's lawyers had asked for compensation for 20 thousand reais, a claim therefore accepted by the judges but not in its full value. However, the humiliation remains for Lula, who had tried to pass off the far-right leader, who has no small amount of judicial troubles and convictions, as a thief from the Beagle Boys. And yet Bolsonaro of charges he has received them, over the years, also for even more squalid events, of which he was - or is still suspected to be - actually guilty, such as the dissemination of fake news, the denial of Covid and the consequent genocide for having let the virus kill over 700 thousand people, and the attempted coup on January 8, 2023, just a few days after the inauguration of his rival.
In short, the former Brazilian president deserved everything except rehabilitation, even if limited to a negligible episode. But that will now be used ferociously against Lula, who is already cornered by the opposition for his ambiguous positions towards Nicolas Maduro's Venezuela, where instead the international community would like Brazil not to recognize the outcome of the last elections and to negotiate with Caracas a peaceful transfer of power to what many consider the legitimate president, namely Edmundo Gonzalez. Lula, on the other hand, continues to kick the ball into the stands, also irritating the United States who would like him to be more exposed against the Chavista regime.
Bolsonaro, for his part, is also riding the wave of war fronts, accusing the current president of being pro-Palestinian (it has become fashionable to show up at right-wing demonstrations with the Israeli flag), and above all of the institutional clash that for months has seen Elon Musk brawling on social media with the Brazilian Supreme Court, which first demanded that X respect democratic rules and then ended up obscuring him, making the eccentric entrepreneur a martyr and the new cult figure of Bolsonarism.
Returning to the case of the Alvorada furniture, the State Attorney General's Office has already announced that it will appeal against the decision of the 17th section of the Federal Justice. In short, the case, worthy of a condominium dispute, is not closed at all, also because the Bolsonaro family complained that the news of the sentence, unfavorable to Lula, was not published on the official channels of the Presidency, as would have been correct to do. Especially after the new government, a few months ago, had used the affair as a reason to justify an extra expense of almost 200 thousand reais for the purchase of luxury furniture, as revealed by the local press.
