BRAZIL’S new Workers Party presidential candidate Fernando Haddad has called on those who want a leader who will stand up to financial markets and the US to vote for him.

Speaking at a meeting with beneficiaries of education programmes of the Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva administration, he said the stock exchange boost that occurred when Lula — as Mr da Silva is universally known — was barred from standing was an indication of the former president’s strength.

Lula, Brazil’s most popular former president and a clear frontrunner in the polls until he was barred from running because of a trumped-up corruption conviction, has endorsed Mr Haddad and running mate Manuela d’Avila of the Communist Party of Brazil (PCdoB).

“They want a president to whom the financial markets can instruct as to what they do and don’t want,” Mr Haddad said. “One who [US President Donald] Trump can tell what he does and doesn’t want.”

He called Lula his inspiration and said he was standing on a manifesto with “my signature on it and Lula’s too.”

The PCdoB has condemned the judicial exclusion of Lula from the race as “an assault on democracy,” but said it was ready to “fight the hard fight, win and rule the country.

Ms d’Avila, it said, had “excited the people, especially women and the youth” and together with the Workers Party had answers to a country “in crisis, divided, threatened by authoritarianism.”

Their campaign would face a “bombardment of lies of the mainstream media, scaremongering by reactionary forces, the judiciary, big economic and financial players” who “have already shown they are willing to do anything” to beat the left.

In response they would need to “mobilise the people in meetings, rallies, parades, organising networks, new and creative initiatives.”