Once convicted of bribery, Brazil's Lula vows to punish corruption

Former leftist president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who spent 19 months in prison on bribery convictions, has promised to crack down on corruption if elected in Brazil's October election.

Lula said on Thursday he would create new mechanisms to investigate anyone in his government accused of corruption and punish them if proven guilty.

"Whoever makes a mistake will pay, you can be sure of that," he said in an interview with TV Globo's Jornal Nacional, a newscast with the largest audience in Brazil.

Lula, who led Brazil from 2003 to 2010, was jailed in the country's biggest corruption investigation that put dozens of politicians and businessmen in prison for graft and bribes. His convictions were later annulled allowing him to run again for office.

"I want to return to do things better this time," he said, admitting mistakes by his handpicked Workers Party (PT) successor Dilma Rousseff, who was impeached in the midst of a recession.

Lula has a double-digit lead in opinion polls over his far-right rival, President Jair Bolsonaro, in Brazil's most polarised race in decades.

Lula said Brazil's powerhouse farm sector had done well during his two terms as president when Brazil enjoyed a commodity boom. Bolsonaro, who is backed by the farm lobby, has eased environmental rules and frozen indigenous land claims.

If some farmers were against him, Lula said, it is because he opposes the destruction of the forest, but "serious" agricultural exporters were against illegal deforestation.

"What we need is to correctly tap our biodiversity and generate employment in the Amazon," he said. 

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A 'moderate' Bolsonaro

Bolsonaro, who is not exactly known for mild rhetoric, is now counting on a more moderate image and economic upturn to win, his communications minister said on Thursday. 

Bolsonaro's polling is bruised by a weak economy, his controversial handling of Covid-19 and what critics call his extremism. Lula leads Bolsonaro by 47 percent to 32 percent, according to the latest poll from the Datafolha institute.

Ten other contenders are polling in single digits.

But his charismatic, cool-tempered communications chief, Fabio Faria, said he is confident a critical mass of Brazilians will ultimately pick Bolsonaro over four more years of the PT.

Surging onto the national scene in the wake of that triple crisis, Bolsonaro won the presidency in 2018 with broad support, taking 55 percent of the vote.

And though some of those voters are disillusioned today, Bolsonaro's camp is confident the incumbent will win them back with a softer tone and an improving economy, Faria told the AFP news agency in an interview at the presidential palace in Brasilia.

Known for downplaying Covid-19 as a "little flu," urging Brazilians to stop being "sissies" about the pandemic, and attacking institutions such as the Superior Electoral Tribunal, whose new chief he once called a "scumbag," Bolsonaro has been dialling his rhetoric down a notch, Faria said.

"The president's more moderate tone speaks to voters who had turned against him because they felt the president's style could have been more moderate," said the telegenic 44-year-old brought in to give the administration a communications makeover in June 2020.

As evidence of Bolsonaro's softer touch, he offered the incumbent's prime-time interview on Monday on TV Globo, the biggest broadcaster in the country of 213 million people.

Despite being a fierce critic of Globo, Bolsonaro was less aggressive than usual during the interview.

But he drew criticism for casting doubt on whether he would accept the election result if he loses.

Bolsonaro said he would respect the outcome "as long as the elections are clean and transparent."

Like many countries, Brazil is suffering from surging prices, fuelled by the effects of the pandemic and Russia's offensive in Ukraine.

But prices posted a record drop of 0.68 percent in July, thanks partly to government fuel tax cuts.

Bolsonaro has also passed a massive social spending programme that recently began making welfare payments of around $110 a month to some 20 million families.

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