RIO DE JANEIRO >> After the police raided his home and prosecutors sought his arrest, the former president of Brazil, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, seemed destined to become the biggest figure caught in the widening corruption investigation upending Latin America’s largest country.

But as it turns out, he may have an unusual escape route. Instead of facing jail, he is becoming a Cabinet minister: President Dilma Rousseff, his protégée and successor, announced Wednesday that she was making him chief of staff.

The move grants da Silva, the founder and face of the governing Workers’ Party, broad legal protections, but it quickly intensified the political upheaval rattling the nation.

Brazil is suffering its worst economic crisis in decades. An enormous graft scheme has hobbled the national oil company. The Zika epidemic is causing despair across the northeast. And just before the world heads to Brazil for the Summer Olympics, the government is fighting for survival, with almost every corner of the political system under the cloud of scandal.

Rousseff is battling to stay in office, with protesters demanding her ouster and lawmakers pursuing impeachment proceedings against her.

But the people aspiring to replace her are under threat, too. The heads of both houses of Congress are being investigated for their roles in the national oil company scandal. The leader of the opposition Social Democrats is under fire over revelations that his family maintains secret bank accounts in Liechtenstein.

Even the low-profile vice president, who has been positioning himself to take over if Rousseff is impeached, is under scrutiny over allegations that he was involved in an illegal ethanol purchasing scheme.

“Brazil has turned into an aspiring banana republic,” said Josias de Souza, a political commentator, pointing to the unusual situation of a sitting president handing over important functions to a besieged mentor.

Brazil, he said, is being “governed by a joke.”

Prosecutors are trying to have da Silva arrested in a corruption case that centers on his ties to giant construction companies. But Cabinet ministers are among the 700 or so senior officials who enjoy special judicial standing, meaning they can be tried only by Brazil’s highest court, the Supreme Federal Tribunal.

Effectively, this prevents nearly all of these figures from going to prison because trials at the court drag on for years. Nearly a third of the 594 members of Congress, including the leaders of the lower house and the Senate, are under scrutiny before the court over claims of violating laws.

As chief of staff, da Silva will take the helm of a government lurching from one crisis to another. He remains a powerful force, a former union leader who founded the governing party during Brazil’s military dictatorship.

“In my government, President Lula will have the necessary powers to help us, to help Brazil,” Rousseff said. “If Lula’s arrival strengthens my government, and there are people who don’t want it strengthened, then what can I do?”

Though da Silva faces multiple corruption investigations, even his critics recognize his mastery of political negotiations, especially in comparison with Rousseff. Her inability to cultivate allies in the capital, Brasilia, may have doomed her to irrelevance long before she brought him aboard, analysts said.

“Vested with the unprecedented function of a de facto prime minister, Lula will oversee an act of political desperation to save what’s left of his project,” said Igor Gielow, a columnist for the newspaper Folha de S. Paulo.

Da Silva, who was president from 2003 through 2010, is defending various investigations into his accumulation of wealth since leaving office. Stunning the political establishment, he was taken into custody for questioning this month in a federal inquiry into renovations of luxury properties by OAS and Odebrecht, two scandal-plagued construction companies.

Da Silva has insisted that he is innocent of any wrongdoing, calling the inquiries attempts to destabilize Rousseff’s government and prevent him from returning to the presidency. He has recently begun mounting a bid to run again in 2018, denouncing political opponents and critics in the news media.

But upon taking up his post, he will have to start with damage control.

On Wednesday, a judge investigating him released an intercept of a phone call between da Silva and Rousseff that seems to signal how they were planning for him to get a Cabinet post. In the call, she said she was preparing his “appointment papers.” The intercept could bolster opponents who say his move into the government was plotted well in advance and may have been illegal, though Rousseff’s office said they were simply following normal procedures.

Beyond that, Delcidio do Amaral, a senator from the Workers’ Party, reached a deal with investigators in which he accused da Silva and Rousseff of obstructing corruption investigations. “I am a prophet of chaos,” do Amaral told reporters after the Supreme Federal Tribunal accepted his plea deal, in which he implicated figures across the ideological spectrum.

While Brasilia braces for the return of da Silva to the daily political fray, others around the country are trying to decipher what comes next.

Alcebiades da Cunha Vieira, a lawyer in Rio de Janeiro, said the dismal economy and the endless stream of scandals had him feeling despondent about his 17-year-old son’s future.

“I want to send him away from this corruption, to Canada or Australia or the United States,” said Cunha Vieira, 57. “The system here ruins people, and I don’t want it to ruin my son.”

Fernando Henrique Cardoso, a former president who is widely admired among da Silva’s opponents, expressed dread about his rival’s return to power.

“I think it’s scandalous for a person to accept a Cabinet post at the moment when he could go on trial,” Cardoso, 84, told reporters. “This intensifies the moral crisis in the country.”

But in a sign of the times, even Cardoso, a sociologist viewed as an elder statesman by his supporters, is among the many Brazilian political figures recently ensnared in scandals.

Investigators are looking into payments he made to a former mistress, and their ties to a company that operated a chain of duty-free shops and arranged to employ her outside Brazil. Cardoso has acknowledged supporting the woman but has insisted that he followed the law in doing so.

It is hard to find a part of Brazil’s political system that has not been tarnished. Da Silva’s former chief of staff, Jose Dirceu de Oliveira e Silva, is in prison on corruption charges. So is Joao Vaccari Neto, the former treasurer of the Workers’ Party.

Meanwhile, investigators are narrowing in on the business dealings of one of da Silva’s sons, Luis Claudio Lula da Silva, who is suspected of receiving illegal payments in connection to a scheme to reduce tax penalties for large corporations.

Marcelo Odebrecht, scion of one of the country’s richest families, was sentenced to 19 years in prison this month for his role in the scandal surrounding Petrobras, the national oil company. Other business titans who are friends of da Silva, like the construction magnate Leo Pinheiro, are also in jail.

Then there are the politicians maneuvering to take power in case da Silva cannot salvage Rousseff’s government. Waiting in the wings are the leaders of the Brazilian Democratic Movement Party, the centrists anchoring Rousseff’s coalition government.

One of its most powerful leaders, Eduardo Cunha, the speaker of the lower house of Congress, is resisting calls to step down. He faces charges of taking as much as $40 million in bribes for himself and his allies.

Da Silva is already reaching out to the leaders of the party to prevent them from breaking from the governing coalition, a move that would make Rousseff far more vulnerable to impeachment. After meeting with da Silva, Renan Calheiros, the president of the Senate, spoke admirably of the former president’s “good ties to Congress.”

Left unsaid: Calheiros, like da Silva and dozens of other figures, is tarnished by various scandals. He resurrected his career after battling revelations that he let a construction company’s lobbyist pay child support for his daughter from an extramarital affair.

More recently, he is facing claims of pocketing large bribes in the Petrobras scandal, remaining at the helm of the Senate thanks in part to the special judicial standing afforded to him and da Silva.

“We’re in the hands of leaders who are bandits,” said Arivaldo Gomes, 54, a deliveryman. “I’m ashamed of this country.”

© 2016 The New York Times Company