Hours ago, Brazilian courts rejected an appeal by former Workers Party (PT) president Luis Inácio Lula da Silva, who last July was sentenced to nearly a decade in prison for corruption and money laundering in a highly controversial and politicized conviction. Today’s decision places Lula’s ability to run in the 2018 presidential elections, which conclude this October, in existential danger. Brazilian law mandates that if a person is convicted of a crime and exhausts their options for appeal, they cannot stand for office for another eight years. Today does not represent Lula’s last chance at appeal, but it throws his standing in the election into instability for months to come.

Despite the persistent insecurity of Lula’s candidacy, PT officials have long insisted he is the only option for 2018. This has to do with his enduring popularity — he’s now leading the polls at 36 percent — as well as the partisan slant of his prosecution, which in the eyes of many, makes “defending Lula’s candidacy” inextricable from “defending democracy.”

For example, Fernando Haddad, the former mayor of São Paulo and a major player in Lula’s campaign, has insisted that a Plan B “does not exist.” “The only plan of the Workers Party,” he says, “is for candidate Lula.” Yet Haddad himself has been frequently cited in the press as the PT alternative in case Lula can’t run — despite the fact that Brazil’s Federal Police are now also pursuing him for crimes of corruption. One blog speculates that in one scenario, “Lula could campaign as a candidate until mid-September, then be substituted just twenty days prior to the first electoral round by another PT figure, such as [ . . . ] Fernando Haddad.”