On November 8, 2019, former Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was released from prison after serving over five hundred days on dubious corruption charges that have since been dropped. Lula’s imprisonment had galvanized much of the international left, including many of its most recognizable figures. Jeremy Corbyn, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, Noam Chomsky, Argentine president Alberto Fernández all expressed enthusiastic support for Lula during his incarceration. His most vocal supporter in the US government during that dark time was, perhaps unsurprisingly, Senator Bernie Sanders.

Sanders has long championed the kind of working-class political project that Lula led for decades as the national face of the Workers’ Party (PT), which governed Brazil from 2003 until 2016. “During his presidency,” Bernie tweeted upon Lula’s release from prison, “Lula da Silva oversaw huge reductions in poverty and remains Brazil’s most popular politician. I stand with political and social leaders across the globe who are calling on Brazil’s judiciary to release Lula and annul his conviction.”

In a remarkable political turnaround, Lula now seems poised to win the presidential election this October, besting the far-right incumbent Jair Bolsonaro in every poll taken this year. And once again, Sanders is lending his voice to a growing chorus of observers in Brazil and abroad concerned about the fate of Brazilian democracy.