Brazil’s ex-president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and pre-candidate for president in 2018 for the Workers’ Party (PT) was convicted yesterday of corruption and money laundering, receiving a sentence of nine years and six months in prison. Lula was condemned for supposedly accepting a luxury beachfront apartment from the massive construction conglomerate, OAS, in exchange for facilitating lucrative contracts.

He remains free until his appeal is judged, which could take up to a year and half. Theoretically he could still be eligible to run in the 2018 elections, but if his conviction is maintained before this, he will lose all his political rights for twenty years.

The judicial decision comes at a time of almost daily political bombshells in Brazil: the day before, a bill that drastically cuts labor rights was passed in the Senate while President Michel Temer, who took office after the PT’s Dilma Rousseff was removed in a parliamentary coup, struggles desperately to save his own mandate after he was caught red-handed on tape discussing bribes and interference in judicial processes with an executive from a multinational meatpacking corporation. Numerous other government politicians who were key players in the coup against Dilma in 2016 are also facing a range of criminal accusations. The fact that they have not yet been charged and still maintain their political power and privileges says a lot about the current political crisis in Brazil.