Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff in 2010. Ricardo Stuckert/Flickr. Some rights reserved.
When Marcelo Odebrecht, president of Brazil’s largest construction company and one of the 25 largest in the world, was arrested on June 19 as part of the investigations into corruption at the national oil company Petrobras, all alarms went off in Dilma Rousseff’s the government, while the Workers Party (PT) and the whole of the Brazilian left found itself in a state of paralysis. The message was clear: the next one to go down could be Lula. The former president was quick to understand the implications and recognize that his proximity to Odebrecht, whose company financed his campaign and travel, inevitably placed him in the investigators line of sight.
A week earlier, on June 13, at the fifth party congress, Lula was harsh in his criticisms of the PT. He contrasted the militant spirit of the party’s founding period three decades ago, with the prevailing style of the present era. “Today it’s all about the post, the job, getting elected, no one is a militant now.” He added that “an internal revolution” would be needed if the party was to attract youth.
