MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

“Madman” Bolsonaro “should have never become President”, says Lula

Lula's words might have been triggered by last Saturday's comments by Bolsonaro to a Portuguese YouTube channel

Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva said Tuesday in Rio de Janeiro that “an ignorant guy like” Jair Bolsonaro should have never reached the Planalto Palace. During a speech on Tuesday in Belford Roxo, Lula also called his predecessor a fool and a bastard, among other epithets.

”It seems to me that the madman who governed this country was an aloprado (crazy). He didn't understand anything except talking nonsense, preaching hatred, and offending others. He didn't understand. The guy let 700,000 people die in this country saying that Covid was a little flu. Ignorant! An ignorant guy like him should never have become President of the Republic. He should have gone somewhere else and never left,“ said Lula.

”Today I delivered houses to 860 families. Houses that began to be built in 2011 and were paralyzed until last year when I became President. And a lot of people waiting for a house to live in and these bastards didn't build houses for the people and kept lying to them,“ he went on in a district where he was ostensibly defeated by Bolsonaro in the Oct. 2022 presidential runoff.

Lula was in Rio de Janeiro to inaugurate a municipal school and make announcements about a federal education institute and a cancer hospital in the region. His words might have been triggered by an interview last Saturday with a Portuguese YouTube channel in which Bolsonaro denounced that ”the Brazilian justice system, the Supreme Court, got Lula out of jail and then made him eligible; and then the STF, three of whose justices make up the Superior Electoral Court, also worked to elect Lula at any price. The elections are over, and nobody understands how Lula da Silva won the elections.“

The retired Army captain insisted that most Supreme Court justices ”said that, with Lula's election, they prevented Brazil from becoming a dictatorship with Jair Bolsonaro.“ Last week he also accused Supreme Court Justice Alexandre De Moraes of ”relentless persecution“ against the Bolsonaro family.

In response, Lula stressed that Bolsonaro ”spoke a lot of nonsense, the Brazilian government doesn't run the Federal Police, much less the Justice system. There's the process, the investigation, the decision by a Supreme Court minister who ordered a search and seizure, on suspicion of bad faith by Abin, of which the delegate in charge was linked to the Bolsonaro family.”

On January 29, Federal Police agents carried out search warrants issued by De Moraes at addresses linked to councilman Carlos Bolsonaro (Republicans-RJ), because of suspicions that the former president's son was involved in the “parallel Abin” case. The police are investigating whether the Bolsonaro family used information from the Abin intelligence agency to benefit themselves.