Here is @LulaOficial addressing his presidential opponent @FlavioBolsonaro during last night’s debate, translated into English: “Get ready, because on the 25th you will lose immunity and you will have problems. Because there are many investigations into your life that will now move forward. If your friends aren’t letting [the investigations] move forward, now they will.” Consider what the sitting president of Brazil has just told the country. October 25 is election day. It is not the expiration date of Flávio’s constitutional protections. His Senate mandate continues into 2027. Defeat in a presidential election does not extinguish it. Yet Lula spoke with remarkable confidence about what investigators would do once the voting was over. On whose authority? If evidence warrants an investigation, it warrants one regardless of the election result. If an investigation advances because the president’s opponent loses, the electoral result has become a condition of criminal enforcement. That is the implication I find so disturbing on the heels of what these people did to @jairbolsonaro to prevent him from being on the ballot during this election cycle. Lula presenting his rival’s legal jeopardy as a consequence of electoral defeat. In a democracy, citizens should choose their government, not STF justices and the sitting president. Brazilians voters do not vote on whether its opponents retain the protection of the law. Lula supplied the date. He owes the country an explanation of the authority that will pursue Flavio as soon as the election is over.