Flávio Bolsonaro, the eldest son of Jair Bolsonaro, is the favourite to beat the leftwing incumbent Lula in the second round of Brazil’s presidential elections on 25 October. This was reported by Qazaqyia.kz citing The Guardian.
Thundering to a crowd of thousands of far-right supporters in São Paulo on 7 September, Brazil’s Independence Day, the senator Flávio Bolsonaro focused less on his opponent in the presidential election, the leftist president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, than on someone who is not running at all. “Whoever votes for Lula is voting for Alexandre de Moraes,” Bolsonaro shouted, referring to the shaven-headed supreme court justice once described as “Voldemort” by Elon Musk.
Although Lula did not appoint Moraes to the court, Bolsonaro’s supporters have linked the two men ever since the judge oversaw the case in which the senator’s father, the former president Jair Bolsonaro, was sentenced to 27 years in prison for attempting a coup.
Now, just days before the election runoff on 25 October, Moraes is once again at the centre of a presidential scandal – one that Lula believes may have helped Flávio Bolsonaro overtake him to emerge as the frontrunner. The justice once hailed as democracy’s “saviour” for containing Jair Bolsonaro may now have helped pave the way for the family’s return to power.
The scandal began with a police investigation, which found that Moraes’s wife’s law firm had a contract worth about £20m with Daniel Vorcaro, the banker accused of orchestrating Brazil’s largest banking fraud. Text messages also emerged suggesting a close relationship between Moraes and Vorcaro, though the judge denies the messages are authentic.
Investigations subsequently revealed that at least four other justices had links to the disgraced banker, meaning half of the court’s 10 current justices have been drawn into the scandal.
The crisis peaked last month with a ferocious exchange of insults between Moraes and another justice during a televised court session. A series of rulings followed in which the pair – as well as other judges aligned with each side – overruled one another, dominating public debate for weeks.
Lula, the day after losing the first round, blamed his poor result in part on having to “carry on his back … the promiscuity” of the supreme court, in what many political observers saw as an attempt by the president to distance himself from the crisis. His campaign coordinator, Edinho Silva, said that, “in the eyes of society … [Lula] paid the price for that institutional damage”.
Although analysts point to a range of reasons for the far right’s lead, from household debt to a simple preference for Flávio Bolsonaro, many agree that the supreme court crisis played a decisive role, particularly among indecisive voters who, with the electorate generally divided between two similarly sized left and right blocs, are the ones who ultimately decide the election.
“These are people who thought that, just as they see congress, the country’s highest court had become corrupt, too. That deepened apathy among some who might otherwise have voted for Lula and fuelled the anti-system sentiment that feeds the far right,” said Camila Rocha, a political scientist who studies Brazil’s new right and has spent recent months interviewing undecided voters.
“We asked people about the court crisis, and they would say: ‘Everything is very confusing, but one thing we do know is that the big villain is Alexandre de Moraes,’” she said. “Precisely the judge who jailed Jair Bolsonaro now emerges, for these people, as the big corrupt figure and the main villain.”
Conrado Hübner Mendes, a professor of constitutional law at the University of São Paulo and a leading scholar of the supreme court, said Moraes put himself in that position by “embracing the role of heroic protagonist”.
The judge blocked some of Jair Bolsonaro’s moves during his government and drew the ire of far-right figures such as Musk and Donald Trump. The US went as far as to impose sanctions on him, in a move widely seen as an attempt to interfere in Jair’s trial.
On Monday, Moraes authorised Flávio Bolsonaro to resume visiting his father after a 90-day ban imposed in July, when the senator read out a letter from his father about the elections that Moraes considered a breach of Jair Bolsonaro’s ban on using social media.
Beyond the anger of Bolsonaro’s supporters, legal scholars and some on the Brazilian left, while acknowledging Moraes’s decisive role in the coup trial, also criticised several of his other rulings as authoritarian.
“He took on a huge responsibility, and now he has thrown that away in the most mediocre way possible, with this alleged corruption case,” said Mendes.
While acknowledging the contract between the law firm run by his wife, Viviane Barci de Moraes, and the disgraced banker – who is worth an extraordinarily...