Because the judge's chief of staff had posted on her Facebook page a petition calling for Lula's imprisonment and the presiding judge of the appellate panel had praised Moro's decision to convict Lula for corruption, before Moro had issued his decision, an op-ed in "The New York Times" concluded that "Brazil’s democracy is now weaker than it has been since military rule ended". The newspaper was joined by a number of international intellectuals, activists and political leaders, from Noam Chomsky to a group of twelve United States Congressmen, who complained that the legal proceedings appeared to be designed to prevent Lula (the front-runner in opinion polls) from running for president in 2018.