By Hotspotnews
Based in the The Wall Street Journal editorial-To Brazil’s Victor Goes Political Revenge. Lula’s government targets losing opponent Flávio Bolsonaro.
The Wall Street Journal, in an great opinion piece, argues that Brazil under President Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva is demonstrates a pattern in which electoral winners pursue legal actions against the vanquished rather than showing traditional political magnanimity. Immediately after Lula’s re-election, authorities ordered defeated opposition leader Flávio Bolsonaro to surrender his passport. Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, identified as a Lula ally, approved a federal police request to seize Flavio’s travel documents, who then, left Brazil secretly with his wife and young daughters, crossing into Argentina before arriving in Miami. The United States issued visas to the family, which the editorial describes as a justifiable form of political protection.
Flávio has not been formally charged with any crime, but knows that he could follow his father’s fate, and suffer the same injustice. The editorial contends he has reasonable grounds to doubt he would receive a fair trial. It cites Lula’s statement during a campaign debate that, once Flávio lost congressional immunity, he would face extensive investigations, characterizing this as a case of selecting the target and then seeking the offense. The piece notes that decisions on whether to prosecute federal politicians properly belong to the attorney general, yet Justice de Moraes has repeatedly expanded his own jurisdiction in ways that align with political objectives.
The editorial places Flávio’s situation in a broader pattern involving the judiciary. It recounts that Flávio’s father, former President Jair Bolsonaro, was convicted the previous year of orchestrating a coup attempt against Lula. The high court reached that outcome in a 4-1 vote that the editorial terms tendentious. Justice de Moraes presided. Two of the justices who voted to convict were Lula appointees—one a former personal lawyer of Lula and the other a former justice minister under him. Justice Luiz Fux wrote a 452-page dissent that, in the editorial’s assessment, detailed multiple due-process failures, including the high court’s lack of jurisdiction and the absence of sufficient evidence. Jair Bolsonaro is serving a 27-year sentence under house arrest.
Flávio’s departure is presented as continuous with the experience of numerous other Brazilian journalists, bloggers, and opinion makers who have chosen exile rather than risk imprisonment. This wave of departures, the editorial notes, has occurred in the years since the Supreme Court vacated Lula’s 2017 corruption conviction and began restricting criticism of the court itself.
Looking forward, the editorial observes that Lula is likely to nominate as many as four new justices to the 11-member Supreme Court over the next four years. It assigns to the newly composed Senate the task of protecting judicial integrity and independence. The piece closes by describing a recurring sequence in countries that move from freedom toward autocracy: a leader wins an election, gains control of the judiciary, and uses it to imprison political enemies. Where institutions remain robust, the rule of law can persist. The editorial states that it is not clear Brazil will follow the latter course.
Source: Wall Street Journal editorial, “To Brazil’s Victor Goes Political Revenge,” by the Editorial Board, October 28, 2026.
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