The White Flag That Angered Lula
By Hotspotnews
The timing is not accidental. The first round left Lula behind Flávio Bolsonaro. Public counts put Flávio near 56.1 million votes and Lula near 53.9 million. Within days, Lula’s own camp raised its tone against the Court. Reporting in Folha de S.Paulo and Correio da Manhã described a candidate trying to shed the image of the STF, calling the “promiscuity” inside the Court a weight his campaign was carrying. CNN Brasil reported that Lula spoke with Justice Flávio Dino and registered the Court’s retreat toward the right. O Tempo asked openly whether the STF was making gestures to the opposition after the first round.
Those gestures are real enough to list. Alexandre de Moraes moved Débora Rodrigues dos Santos, “Débora do Batom,” into a semi-open regime after a 14-year sentence tied to the January 8, 2023 events. Other files involving Flávio Bolsonaro and bolsonarista allies moved at the same moment the right gained ground in the Senate and impeachment talk against ministers grew louder. A Court that spent years treating dissent as a security problem does not soften because it discovered restraint. It softens when the electoral math changes.
That is why Lula’s anger, if Bergamasco’s account holds, is the most honest statement of the last week. A president who needs an independent judiciary does not rage when that judiciary eases its hand. A president who has treated the Moraes wing as an auxiliary campaign office does. For years the opposition has argued that censorship orders, account bans, and heavy sentences for political speech were not neutral law. They were a political instrument. The instrument only becomes a problem for Lula when it stops working in his favor.
The attempt to pose as anti-system is the second tell. Lula spent this term defending “harmony among the powers” and standing beside the presidents of the STF, the Senate, and the Chamber. He now wants voters to believe the same Court is a burden he resents. Voters can hold both facts at once: the Court overreached, and the president who benefited from that overreach is only distancing himself because the first round went badly.
None of this absolves the STF. A tribunal that jails a hairdresser for years over lipstick on a statue, then adjusts the regime when the polls turn, has already confessed that politics sits inside the sentence. Conservatives should not confuse a tactical white flag with repentance. They should treat it as evidence. The same ministers who framed ordinary opposition as a threat to democracy are now calculating how that frame will look in a second round they may lose.
Brazil does not need a softer persecution. It needs a Court that stops being a faction. If Lula is irritated that the persecution is pausing, the country has its answer about who the persecution was for.
Sources: Post by MichelcSales citing Débora Bergamasco, October 8, 2026; CNN Brasil report on Lula, Flávio Dino, and the STF’s retreat toward the right; Folha de S.Paulo, Painel, on Lula’s campaign raising its tone against the STF after the first round; Correio da Manhã on Lula’s effort to separate himself from the Court; O Tempo on post-first-round STF signals involving Flávio Bolsonaro and Débora do Batom; first-round vote totals reported by g1.
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