Brazil’s upcoming election pits President Lula da Silva, eighty, against Senator Flávio Bolsonaro, forty-five. If he wins, Lula will serve a record fourth (non-consecutive) term. His opponent is the son of former president Jair Bolsonaro. To much of the unenthusiastic electorate, it feels like an election about nothing. Both candidates have rejection rates between 45 and 55 percent. Lula’s slogan is “Brazil, ready for more” (of what?); Flavio mainly wants to get his dad out of jail. It is the old versus the not-quite-new.
“No one really rules Brazil.”
That isn’t to say that matters of great importance won’t be decided. The issues at stake include the growing national debt, who has access to rare earth minerals, and a slew of soon-vacant seats on the Supreme Court. The problem, however, is that no one really rules Brazil. After a decade defined by an unending string of scandals, the country suffers a crisis of legitimacy and a void of political authority.
Lula’s Workers Party (PT) has held the presidency for seventeen of the past twenty-four years. But with a small minority of seats in Congress, the party has proven unable to impose a governing program in the way holding office would suggest. The Bolsonaro clan still has leadership of the conservative camp, having supplanted the moderate center-right eight years ago in a radicalization similar to that which took place across Western Europe or North America. But Jair Bolsonaro is imprisoned and unhealthy, and his sons inspire little loyalty beyond the base. Their response to the impasse has been to look up for salvation—to North America and Donald Trump.
On the issues that pollsters say most concern Brazilians—security, above all, but also the cost of living, health and education—there is little concrete debate, let alone vision. Instead, Brazil is riven by scandal and institutions at each other’s throats. Most notable is the Supreme Court. Justices launch accusations at colleagues in public sessions while Congress threatens to impeach them. It is comeuppance for an institution that has become far too powerful, and in particular for one justice who made himself sovereign.
At the center of the latest scandal is Daniel Vorcaro, a disgraced banker responsible for the country’s largest ever banking fraud and a much less-discussed scheme for legally ripping off public workers through a payroll-deduction credit card. In only a few years, Vorcaro became incredibly well-connected, benefiting from the benign neglect of the Central Bank president and paying off other directors at the institution. He hosted bunga-bunga parties in New York for Brazil’s financial and political elite and traveled on one of his multiple private jets to Courchevel with his “friend for life,” an influential senator to whom he was paying monthly stipends of between $60,000 and $95,000. The scandal around Vorcaro’s defunct Banco Master revealed a compromised regulator, a drained state bank, bought-off politicians, a prison suicide, plunder of public funds, and a very bad bit of cinema.
Of greatest consequence are Vorcaro’s links to Supreme Court justices. He hosted them at lavish dinners, went into business with one, hired the spouses of others as lawyers for exorbitant fees, and in general held contacts that a sober judge should judge untoward. We know all of this because institutional politics in Brazil is now conducted through that most contemporary and mercurial of means: leaks, especially of private communications. And in Brazil that means WhatsApp.
To take one example: Two days before Vorcaro was sensationally arrested at the airport as he tried to flee to Dubai, he messaged Moraes, “does [Central Bank President] Galípolo know? By Monday do I need to be gone?” Other messages retrieved from Vorcaro’s phone signal his life-long gratitude to Moraes. The messages were written in the iPhone Notes app, screenshotted, and sent as one-time view messages, a mode of communication Moraes himself had classified as an obstruction of justice in another case. Moraes’s phone was not seized, meaning his replies are unknown and the justice’s complicity is unproven. But the stain of scandal remains.
It is less clear who benefits electorally from Vorcaro’s fall. In 2025, Moraes sentenced Jair Bolsonaro to twenty-seven years imprisonment for an incompetently attempted coup in early 2023; the judge had also been running an almost autonomous, wide-ranging inquiry into “fake news” that saw him summarily take social media accounts off air, leading to a spectacular clash with Elon Musk. All of this allowed him to cast himself as the guarantor of Brazilian democracy (of a bulletproofed, not-very-representative sort). As such, he has become associated with the institutional left, with the PT, and with Lula.
The scandal around him should therefore help Flávio: Who wouldn’t desire the destruction of his father’s jailer? But dig deeper and there are always further complications. Another justice, Dias Toffoli, is even more implicated with Vorcaro and Banco Master, but he was not investigated and his communications not leaked, because the justice who holds rapporteurship, André Mendonça, is a Bolsonaro appointee. Two weeks ago it came to a head in a degrading spectacle, with justices calling each other liars. Brazilians now once again know the names and faces of those they maybe shouldn’t—those who should be quiet and demure upholders of the Constitution.
Does anyone care? According to pollster Datafolha, nearly half the population feel the Supreme Court and Master scandal will influence their vote, with over a third saying it will have a big influence. Flávio voters care more than Lula voters (by 45 to 26 percent), and greater numbers think the left is more implicated than the right.
If the scandal helps to put an end to Lula’s political career, it would be the most ironic, and bathetic, of denouements. Since 2014, Brazil has undergone a series of rolling crises, centered around corruption revelations. These crises intersect with—they are both cause and consequence of—economic downturns and strangling institutional dysfunction.
In 2014, the Lava Jato corruption probe revealed an arachnoid scheme of overbilling and kickbacks between the state-controlled oil giant Petrobras, huge construction companies, and multiple political parties. Running until 2021, it led to the arrest of business leaders and sitting politicians including Lula himself, who spent 580 days in jail. The revelations served as political fuel, but not legal justification, for impeaching Lula’s successor, Dilma Rousseff, in 2016. The first irony is that it was the PT who had first empowered the judiciary and the public prosecutor to carry out the relevant investigations. Then a radical section of the judiciary, wedded to highly legalistic conception of society, pursued Lula for years.
The second ironic reversal was the revelation in 2019 that the anti-corruption campaign was itself corrupted. A series of leaks revealed the judge and the prosecutor were in cahoots, with the lead judge back-seat driving investigations and orchestrating leaks to the media, whose reporting was sometimes even used as corroborating evidence. Lula was released, and his and many others’ convictions were annulled.
When former army captain Jair Bolsonaro was elected on a wave of anti-political sentiment, he hired Lula’s jailer as his justice minister. The latter quit after a year under a cloud of disgrace and his own discomfort at being used. Bolsonaro’s disgovernment was characterized by institutional chaos amidst the pandemic, as he set out to deliberately impede governmental capacities. Pursuing re-election, he turned on the fiscal firehose—a “secret budget” of congressional amendments that would ultimately total some $10 billion by the end of 2022, equivalent to a quarter of discretionary fiscal spending. It became part of a process by which the legislature would become ever more powerful, hoovering up pork for itself.
Lula returned, promising to save democracy. As if to prove the point, Bolsonaristas caused chaos in order to prompt the military to intervene. They also cooked up a scheme to assassinate Lula along with Justice Alexandre de Moraes, who would take on the rapporteurship of the coup-attempt case.
Moraes—known as Xandão (in English it would be “Big Lex”)—had always been associated with the center-right. But in another one of these strange reversals of political polarity that mark our age, Moraes became a hero to the left: scourge of coup mongers, jailer of Bolsonaro, and in the clash with Elon Musk over social media takedown orders, defender of national sovereignty against the Trump-aligned magnate. Moraes was even placed under sanctions by the Trump administration.
For the left, the myth of the impartial judge had been buried in the febrile atmosphere of the right-wing anti-corruption crusade of the mid-2010s. Moraes’s pursuit of Bolsonaristas did the same for the far right, which in turn re-enchanted the left with the counter-majoritarian power of the togas and the courts. It would be yet another irony if Xandão’s implication in the Master scandal gives Flávio Bolsonaro the narrow edge to put an end to Lula’s political career.
“Now it is the Supreme Court in the crosshairs.”
Forty-five percent of Brazilians now distrust the Supreme Court, the highest on record. It is about the same level as for Congress, political parties, and the presidency. These latter numbers are actually down on the historic levels of distrust—indeed, disgust—that they hit last decade, when they reached the high sixties. But it is not so much that these institutions have recuperated any of their legitimacy as that the spectacle of scandal has moved on. Now it is the Supreme Court in the crosshairs.
This is the institutional razed earth of the anti-corruption crusade, its long hangover. If we understand politics as the union of ideals and interests, concretized in a program, and advanced by representatives of the people, then this whole practice has come to be undermined, degraded. Lava Jato presented itself as a noble attempt to put an end to corruption once and for all but, behind this moralistic ideal, there was a great deal of cynicism about any national project for Brazil and the grubby compromises that always accompany capitalist politics. The radical judiciary believed that no progress could be made until Brazil was set on its proper legal footing. That puts the cart before the horse. The history of development around the world shows that there is no order before progress.
Instead of enabling progress, moralistic fervor and resigned disappointment have lowered expectations. Scandal-mongering has become the central tool of politics, wielded first by the right, then by the left, and now by the right again. Indeed, the left now keeps trying to pin Vorcaro on the right. It has some basis for doing so: Vorcaro made hundred-million dollar payments to fund a (still-unmade) hagiographic film about Jair Bolsonaro; the suspicion is that this was to cover living costs for Flávio’s brother Eduardo Bolsonaro, self-exiled in the United States after being sentenced for lobbying against his own country.
At every turn, politics becomes further demoralized. Congress has become fat on pork but has no desire to lead. Having suffered the scare of Lava Jato, during which one-sixth of legislators were under investigation, congressmen aspire to little more than remaining in office. Meanwhile, over 90 percent of the federal budget goes on mandatory spending and the share remaining to the president is shrinking fast. The executive cannot really lead, and government can only be accomplished by diving into the swamp.
The upper ranks of the judiciary sought to fill this vacuum of authority, but every activist step it took in attempting to right the republic undermined its role as guarantor of the constitution. Who elected them anyway? So it is perhaps fitting that Brazil’s latest leak-lubricated scandal has come for the judiciary.
Whoever wins October’s election will not really rule Brazil. Lula’s workout videos do not disguise a loss of political vigor. He does not feel like a man in tune with his times, and he has no credible successor. But if Lula can’t lead, Flávio doesn’t want to. His clan’s imbrication with organized crime and subservience to Washington tells you all you need to know about their ultimate ambitions. Finance, agribusiness, and the extractive industries will win again.