Twenty years before Acadêmicos de Niterói entered Sapucaí with , the PT went to court to try to stop the parade in São Paulo paying homage to PSDB pre-candidates for the Presidency. The action was similar to that of the parade by opposition parties.
In February 2006, the then leader of the PT councilors’ bench in São Paulo, Arselino Tatto, presented it to the TJ-SP (Court of Justice of São Paulo). The objective was to prevent the Leandro de Itaquera samba school, in the east zone of the city, from parading with a car that would honor the current vice-president of the Republic, (), who at the time was governor of São Paulo for , and the toucan, who was the mayor of the capital. Both were possible PSDB candidates for president in the 2006 election.
Giant dolls of the two politicians would make up one of the floats of the association whose president, Leandro Alves Martins, had already been the defeated PSDB candidate for councilor in 2004.
The plot would address one of Alckmin’s main electoral showcases — the works to lower the Tietê gutter. The river had already been Leandro’s theme in the 1990s, but the school decided to do a repeat with a different “outfit”.
In his legal action, Tatto claimed that the tribute constituted “personal promotion of politicians and authorities”.
The . The judge argued that the allegation was based on presumptions and could not “override the principle of freedom of artistic expression”.
On the day of the parade, they came right behind a car representing the gay pride parade. Leandro de Itaquera was relegated that year.
The parade was once again the target of the PT months later to the Independent League of São Paulo, as a sponsorship. This expense had exceeded the investment of R$1.2 million in the advertising campaign to publicize the bank’s results in 2005.
One hundred Nossa Caixa employees would have paraded in costumes donated by Leandro de Itaquera. On the catwalk, they helped to swell the chorus of the samba-enredo about the works on the Tietê River carried out by Alckmin.
Wanted by Sheetformer councilor Arselino Tatto stated that the situations in 2006 and this year are different. According to him, in the case of Leandro de Itaquera there was direct involvement of tucanos in the choices of the samba school, while in the case of Acadêmicos de Niterói there was no interference from the federal government or Lula in the association’s decisions.
“Lula sought out the CGU [Controladoria-Geral da União]he went to ask and was informed correctly. The party was discussing the pros and cons, and from the moment we had a legal guarantee that everything was fine, ok, and it was beautiful”, said Tatto.
