That magistrate (rewarded by becoming Bolsonaro’s first minister of justice) has now been exposed by the Supreme Court as irredeemably biased. I was the only observer of the farcical appeal hearing, at a court whose president had already declared the magistrate’s judgment “impeccable” and where the prosecutor sat beside the judges. After defence counsel addressed, the judges pulled out their pre-written judgments to reject his appeal and the magistrate ordered him to jail.

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At this point, some urged Lula to flee the country or to stand alongside his millions of supporters and to fight. Instead, he appealed for calm and announced: “I am not going on the run. I am not hiding. I want my enemies to know that I am going to prove my innocence.” It took a long time – 585 days, mostly of solitary confinement, mostly in maximum security prisons – before he could do so.

His beloved wife died, many thought from the stress and heartache as she was wrongly accused as a co-conspirator. Internationally, the centre-left took fright at the C-word – corruption – and remained silent, but Australian Sharan Burrow, head of the UN’s International Trade Union Confederation, championed Lula’s cause, and in Britain Jeremy Corbyn expressed his support.

In 2018, we brought a case against Brazil in the UN Human Rights Committee in Geneva, which directed that Lula should be allowed to stand, and to campaign from prison, in that year’s presidential elections. He was well ahead of Bolsonaro in the polls. But the government disqualified him and the neo-fascist Bolsonaro then defeated his replacement.

Last year, Brazil’s Supreme Court finally annulled Lula’s conviction – in part because of the proven bias of the magistrate. The judgment of the UN Human Rights Committee confirms this: it ruled that his trial was demonstrably unfair, the tapping of his phones (and those of his lawyers) an illegal invasion of his privacy, and that his pre-trial demonisation by the magistrate and his police agents had turned his prosecution into a persecution.

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Lula’s inauguration takes place on January 1, leaving Bolsonaro with time to make mischief. In his first public remarks since his loss, Bolsonaro did not concede defeat but said he would follow the constitution and that he had “always played by the rules”. Nevertheless, he relied, in the last week of the campaign, on an enthusiastic video endorsement from Donald Trump, and he may try to challenge the result even though Brazil’s vote-counting procedures are state-of-the-art.

But Lula has overcome all of the obstacles thrown his way by an establishment prepared to do everything in its power to stop him. He’s already made history by being elected president of a state that persecuted him, and says he will fight to ensure the will of the people is upheld.

Now he promises to protect the Amazon from deforestation, which escalated under Bolsonaro, and from illegal miners and ranchers. His election is, indeed, a gift to the world.

As Lula often quotes from a favourite Pablo Neruda poem, “You can cut all the flowers, but you cannot keep spring from coming”.

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