On Sunday, Brazilians will head to the polls for the first round of voting in their presidential election, with a runoff between the first two candidates scheduled for October 30^th. According to a recent poll, however, there might not be a runoff at all since former left‐​wing president Luiz Inácio “Lula” Da Silva, who governed Brazil from 2003 to 2010, might obtain over 50 percent of the vote in the first round and win outright. According to Gallup, only 38 percent of voters approve of the current president, Jair Bolsonaro, Da Silva’s main opponent. Bolsonaro trails Da Silva by well over 10 points in most polls, which project the incumbent’s defeat in a landslide if he does qualify for a runoff.

Since Bolsonaro first ran for president in 2018, the Associated Press and other outlets have labelled him the “Trump of the Tropics.” While comparisons between Donald Trump and other foreign leaders are often far‐​fetched, Bolsonaro has lent credence to the theory with his recent threats to not recognize the election’s results. As voters prepare to head to the polls, much of the global media has relished the prospect of Da Silva’s return to power at Bolsonaro’s expense.

“‘Olê, olá, Lula!’ Brazil’s voters sing for a heroic comeback to banish Bolsonaro,” reads a headline in The Guardian. “Lula Da Silva could back historic comeback in Brazil,” says Deutsche Welle.

The comeback — more histrionic than historic — refers to the way in which Da Silva slipped through the cracks of Brazil’s criminal justice system after receiving a 12‐​year jail sentence for corruption in 2017. His conviction arose from the Lava Jato (or Car Wash) investigation, which exposed a bribes‐​for‐​political‐​access scheme that shook politics in Brazil and throughout Latin America. As recently as November 2019, the current presidential frontrunner was behind bars.

Odebrecht, the Brazilian infrastructure conglomerate that bribed officials in 12 countries according to the U.S. Department of Justice, spent hundreds of millions of U.S. dollars in kickbacks in Brazil during Da Silva’s time in office and that of Dilma Rousseff, his Chief of Staff and successor as president. Brazil’s Workers’ Party, to which both Da Silva and Rousseff belong, was at the scandal’s epicenter. In 2016, Rousseff was impeached, albeit over illegal measures to conceal a budget deficit.

In 2019, Brazil’s Supreme Court annulled Da Silva’s conviction when it ruled that former judge Sergio Moro, who led the Lava Jato proceedings, had no jurisdiction over the former president’s case as a federal judge from Curitiba, a city in the state of Paraná. As the BBC reported at the time, Supreme Court Justice Edson Fachin “agreed with Lula’s lawyers” that a Paraná court “should not have tried Lula because the crimes he was accused of did not take place in that state.” Fachin argued that, instead, Da Silva should be tried in Brasilia, the country’s capital, where the former president used to reside. He also considered that Moro was biased against Da Silva. Seven of eleven justices agreed, thus allowing the former president to leave prison and run for office once again.

Moro did reveal his political leanings when he became Bolsonaro’s justice minister. After his resignation, he ran for president himself (against both Bolsonaro and Da Silva), but ended his campaign due to a lack of voter support. Nevertheless, Moro is not the only judge to have ruled against Da Silva. In January of 2018, a Brazilian appeals court in the city of Portoalegre not only upheld Da Silva’s conviction unanimously, but also increased his sentence from nine years to twelve.

Since the Supreme Court’s subsequent annulment hinged on matters of jurisdiction, Da Silva’s alleged links with Odebrecht’s multitentacled and institutionalized disbursement of graft are yet to be fully clarified. This remains the case even though the United Nations Human Rights Committee (UNHRC) determined last April that Da Silva’s trial had “violated his right to be tried by an impartial tribunal, his right to privacy and his political rights.”

As The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board writes, Da Silva “was freed and maintains his innocence, though he was never cleared in court because he was never retried,” among other things due the expiration of the statute of limitations. There is also the matter that, as a Prosecutor General argued when Rousseff faced Odebrecht‐​related corruption accusations from her time as energy minister, “the president cannot be investigated during her term of office for facts not relevant to her actions as president.” When legal immunity is the prize of victory, a certain type of candidate can become extraordinarily keen to win the presidency.

There is also the matter of Justice Fachin, who hardly can claim political impartiality himself. When Rousseff appointed him to the Supreme Court in 2015, O Globo, a Brazilian daily, reported that, in 2010, Fachin, then a law school professor at the Federal University of Paraná, had signed and openly supported a lawyers’ manifesto urging voters to back Rousseff. It was necessary, the manifesto claimed, to guarantee the continuity of Da Silva’s political program.

Highly politicized courts have long been a staple of Latin American legal systems, which begs the question of why so many foreign journalists—after years of hammering the region’s “pervasive corruption” — have made light of Da Silva’s role in the Odebrecht scandal during the current campaign. Writing in The Spectator, for instance, one commentator assures that Da Silva’s corruption charges were “squashed,” which is hardly accurate. The concern for Bolsonaro’s more authoritarian instincts and his recent questioning of the country’s electoral system is justified. Giving Da Silva and the Workers’ Party a free pass for monumental levels of corruption, not so much.