MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Bolsonaro and Lula score separate TSE victories

Campaigning rivalry between Lula and Bolsonaro has reached the TSE

Former President Luiz Inácio Lula Da Silva's team has been banned from further using campaign ads linking the incumbent Jair Bolsonaro to cannibalism.

Superior Electoral Court (TSE) Justice Paulo de Tarso Sanseverino made that decision while acquiescing to a request from Bolsonaro's rightwing Liberal Party.

Lula's campaign took advantage of a fragment of an interview given by Bolsonaro to the New York Times in 2016 in which he stated that he would “eat Indians without any problems.” In that interview, Bolsonaro said he did not engage in any anthropophagic ritual because no one he knew agreed to join him during a visit to an indigenous ethnic group.

Bolsonaro's legal team argued that the progressive Workers' Party (PT) ad “exceeds the limits of freedom of expression,” to which the magistrate agreed.

During a campaign rally in Belo Horizonte, Lula insisted it was not a hoax, but a statement pronounced by Bolsonaro himself. “That's how he thinks,” Lula stressed.

Lula won the first round of the presidential election last October 2, with 48.4% of the votes, against Bolsonaro's 43.2%. As neither candidate obtained more than 50% of the votes, both candidates will face each other next October 30 in a runoff.

Meanwhile, Agencia Brasil reported that Lula's team had filed a petition before the TSE claiming that Bolsonaro had failed to comply with a decision by Chief Justice Alexandre De Moraes, who ordered the removal of publications linking the PT candidate to the criminal organization PCC and requested the incumbent president be fined. According to Lula's lawyers, Bolsonaro has not removed said postings from social media.

In his decision, De Moraes considered allegations that PCC leader Marcos Camacho, a.k.a. Marcola, would vote for Lula, due to which the publication by Bolsonaro's campaign conveyed “a fact known to be untrue, with serious decontextualization.”

“In fact, the transcribed dialogues, besides relating to prison conditions, present only political connotation, as they portray alleged discussion of Marcola and other interlocutors regarding Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Jair Messias Bolsonaro,” said De Moraes. “Although the content of the dialogues reveals a comparative discussion between the candidates, there is no declaration of the vote [intention],” the magistrate added.

In addition to Bolsonaro, the decision also affected news outlets, journalists, and politicians who had spread the information determined to be false, such as O Antagonista, Rádio Jovem Pan, and Terra.

According to the latest Datafolha survey, Lula has 49% of voting intention against Bolsonaro's 44% for Oct. 30.