Scandal explodes as country’s election campaign peaks, with polls suggesting dead heat between candidates
Brazil’s supreme court has been thrust into what experts consider the greatest crisis since the return of democracy in the 1980s, as two rival judges lock horns on the eve of the presidential election with unpredictable consequences for Latin America’s largest democracy.
The politically charged dispute exploded into public view on Tuesday as judges traded insults and accusations during a heated supreme court hearing that was livestreamed into millions of Brazilian homes.
During one of the most ferocious exchanges, one of the judges at the eye of the storm, Alexandre de Moraes, berated his rival, André Mendonça: “You’re at the service of a political group that tried to launch a coup in this country!”
“It’s a lie!” Mendonça cried back.
Minutes later, a third judge, Gilmar Mendes, angrily accused Mendonça of weaponizing the court’s work to cause political chaos and influence October’s presidential election.
“Don’t point your finger at me, Minister Gilmar! Don’t point your finger! You’re not talking to any old person! Show some respect to this court!” Mendonça warned Mendes, who shot back: “Respect is earned, not given.”
The courtroom drama – in many ways a proxy for the electoral battle between the leftwing president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and his far-right rival, Flávio Bolsonaro – pits Moraes, a pugnacious shaven-headed martial arts practitioner, against Mendonça, a Presbyterian pastor who is the only openly evangelical member of the 11-seat court.
Moraes was appointed almost a decade ago by rightwing president Michel Temer. But the 57-year-old judge is widely associated with Lula thanks to his successful prosecution of Flávio Bolsonaro’s father, the former president Jair Bolsonaro, for plotting a botched coup after losing the 2022 election to the leftwing veteran.
Mendonça, meanwhile, was named during Jair Bolsonaro’s 2018-23 presidency and leftwingers widely view him as a stooge for the disgraced ex-president, who is serving a 27-year sentence for his failed power grab.
With less than three weeks to go until the election, the two judges have gone to war, as Brazil’s biggest-ever banking scandal has snowballed into a judicial and political crisis of similarly shocking proportions.
The Banco Master scandal began last November when the playboy owner of that collapsed bank, Daniel Vorcaro, was arrested by federal police as he prepared to board a private jet from São Paulo to Malta.
Investigations uncovered apparent links between the jailed banker and an astonishing panoply of figures from Brazil’s political and judicial elite, foremost among them Flávio Bolsonaro and Moraes. Other members of the supreme court and their relatives have also been linked to Vorcaro.
Mendonça has been accused of deliberately fast-tracking the investigation into Moraes, while stalling the inquiry into Vorcaro’s ties to the Bolsonaros and the banker’s bankrolling of a film about Jair Bolsonaro.
Earlier this month, Mendonça unsealed an explosive police dossier relating to the Banco Master investigation that contained compromising WhatsApp exchanges apparently between Vorcaro and Moraes as well as a copy of a $25m contract between Banco Master and the law firm of Moraes’s wife. In one text message, sent two days before his arrest, Vorcaro asked Moraes: “Do you think … I need to get out [of the country]?”
Moraes hit back on the eve of Tuesday’s hearing, claiming he was being smeared with politically-motivated “criminal lies” as part of a revenge attack by the rightwing forces behind the coup attempt that culminated in the January 2023 riots in Brasília. Moraes also alleged that the attacks on him involved “external actors” and were part of a possible foreign attempt to interfere in Brazil’s election.
The Moraes/Mendonça tussle reached a crescendo on Tuesday as supreme court judges convened in Brasília to decide whether an investigation should be opened into Moraes’s conduct. Moraes has demanded an investigation into Mendonça.
The judicial scandal has exploded just as Brazil’s election campaign is coming to a head, with polls suggesting a dead heat between Lula and Bolsonaro, who are likely to face off in a second-round run-off on 25 October.
“The timing is awful. We are just a few weeks away from elections that already look to be challenging for a democracy that has been struggling to deal with extremist and anti-democratic groups that continue to be an important political force in the country. So I think we have a perfect storm here,” said Eloísa Machado, a constitutional law professor who follows the supreme court.
Machado said Lula had “absolutely nothing to do” with the scandal engulfing Moraes and the supreme court, noting how the leftwing president had not appointed the judge.
Even so, the crisis looks likely to hurt Lula’s chances of winning a historic fourth term, given the widespread public association between him and Moraes because of the judge’s involvement in Jair Bolsonaro’s jailing.
In a social media video posted as Tuesday’s hearing played out, Flávio Bolsonaro blamed the judicial scandal on Lula’s administration but made no mention of his own alleged ties to Vorcaro.
“This [is happening] because the current government ... is part of this decaying system and we are now seeing this rotten system reveal itself before the eyes of the entire nation,” Bolsonaro said, claiming Lula had “shared power” with Moraes.
Thomas Traumann, a political analyst, predicted the scandal would accelerate the election campaign’s descent into a carnival of mudslinging, as both sides battled to convince voters of their rival’s sins.
“This campaign is going to get dirtier much faster than we had expected,” he said.