Congratulations to all the South Africans, Canadians, English, and Irish celebrating Lula Inácio da Silva’s (unexpected) electoral victory in Brazil. It must be deeply satisfying to know your safety is now assured, your costs of living reduced, and your prospects of work amplified. To those equally disappointed in Flávio Bolsonaro’s lacklustre performance, the result of campaign complacency, well, you can always write the senator a letter of support as he gears up to join his father for a longish stint in the slammer.

The only person on the winning side unhappy with Sunday’s events appears to be Lula himself. He might have to do something radical now to placate the world’s supply of panic and moral chicanery that swarmed (uninvited) into Brazilian politics in the past three weeks. For the past four years Lula has governed as a wet Liberal Democrat or middling ActionSA MP, like Alan Beesley. Perhaps maintaining the status quo is the fate of all today’s socialists – you shout “No pasarán!” under a framed photo of Alan in your office.

The anxiety in the weeks leading up to Sunday revealed something depressing about our expectations of politicians, our fabricated grasp of universalism, and possibly tells us why so many of us invariably concede to disappointment when our favoured candidates in countries we have nothing to do with fail, or appear to fail, during their terms. On Sunday, continental Europeans sighed with relief. Gays in Dublin and Toronto cheered. Some Liberal Democrats, from a party once represented by Harry Willcock, the quintessential man against the state whose personal defiance led to the scrapping of post war identity cards, claimed that “democracy had won”.

There is only one vicarious hope held in Lula’s fourth term, and it's a stretch: the protection of the Amazon. Bolsonaro reportedly had other ideas; whether he could muster the initiative will never be known. But despite deforestation falling to its lowest level in decades under Lula, last year the COP crowd made a 13.2km four-laned highway named Avenida Liberdade in the forest that provided climate change executives a seamless ten-minute journey from the newly expanded Belém International Airport where they had landed in private Gulf Streams.

Will he do something?

Everything else? Who knows. Central to Brazil’s election, we were told, was the unbearably high cost of living and an epidemic of violent crime. Perhaps now Lula is president, he will actually do something  (besides appear in photographs with other crusty socialists). For those asking why that was not possible previously, in the same way residents of London ask its mayor after he makes sets of apparently unique promises before another election, it may be helpful to look to where exactly power in Brazil, and elsewhere, actually sits these days.

The closest here is likely the judiciary, where both the judge who approved Sunday’s election extension by two hours and a guy called Alexandre de Moraes can be found. Cristiano Zanin was previously Lula’s personal attorney during the latter’s Operation Car Wash trials; he didn’t manage to keep Lula out of prison, but the notoriety he earned among the public was eased by Lula’s acquittal. De Moraes is a different animal.

Appointed to the Supreme Court in 2017, De Moraes is bald, cunning, ruthless and most importantly, insulated by robes: the perfect contemporary tyrant for a world drunk on terms such as “social justice”. Even set among the conditions of the country’s neighbour Argentina in the 1970s, his nerve is breathtaking; having just thrown Flávio Bolsonaro’s dad Jair in jail for 27 years, he was caught in messages with a fraudster banker whose firm paid his wife millions.

The theory that De Moraes pursued Bolsonaro Snr (and will now pursue his son) because he is a demented left-winger does not hold when his history is examined. This tyrant emerged from the right and was until very recently considered pro-austerity and pro-banker. Less than a decade ago, he was accused of being complicit in the murder of poor blacks as justice secretary for the governor of São Paulo.

Meaningless

This is what makes any theory of ideology in every normie or progressive establishment today meaningless. Almost every administration features one or more De Moraes, sometimes clusters. If it’s not the Australian Federal Police chief Krissy Barrett refusing to link Islam with the pogrom on Bondi Beach last year, it’s the United Kingdom’s former attorney-general persecuting veterans who fought for his country, at the same time giving away national security assets, in the name of “social justice”. Emmanuel Macron has faced criticism for his management of the French economy, but the fixture of the European Union’s austerity conditions ensures the real power lies outside the Élysée Palace, in the hands of the appointed. This, all before you get to the European Courts of Human Rights in Strasbourg.

As Brazil will reveal, power is not the ability to claim you’ve saved a country from “authoritarianism”. That’s just post-electioneering. Power may not even be assuming office anymore. That is just symbolic. Power today is not just power without accountability, as De Moraes evidently possesses, or censorship sold as virtue, or personal networks that reek of the same corruption he and his ilk claims to fight. It is that people like De Moraes exist in the successful projection of themselves as democratic, “caring”, non-fascistic, or “anti-racist” fixtures, snaking themselves around the romantic but rapidly fading glow of people like Lula.