The outrageous conviction in the first Court of former President Lula da Silva by Judge Sérgio Moro represents an eminently political lawsuit, an integral and inseparable part of an institutional coup that led to the deposition of President Dilma Rousseff last year and which is still underway in Brazil.

A conviction whose purpose and political nature becomes all the more clear, when it is widely denounced that the charges against Lula da Silva are not substantiated and when his candidacy for the coming Brazilian presidential election is rightly regarded by putschist sectors as a serious threat to the continuation of their plan to attack democracy and the sovereignty of Brazil, and against the political, social and economic rights of the Brazilian people -a recent example of which is the adoption of new labour legislation that constitutes a brutal aggression against the rights achieved by Brazilian workers.

Fully convinced that justice will prevail, the PCP reaffirms its solidarity to the communists and other progressive, democratic and patriotic Brazilian forces, to the workers and the Brazilian people and their struggle against the putschist process of the reactionary forces and of imperialism and their anti-democratic, anti-social and anti-patriotic plan and for the continuation and deepening of the path of social progress and sovereign affirmation.