BRASÍLIA — After several stumbles, the son of former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro is enjoying a late surge before next month’s presidential election as a scandal in the Supreme Court energizes the right.
Right-wing Sen. Flávio Bolsonaro is now polling evenly with left-wing President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and for the first time in months, prediction markets are favoring the challenger over the incumbent.
At issue are private messages that appear to show a close relationship between Justice Alexandre de Moraes and a banker accused of orchestrating Brazil’s biggest financial fraud.
Moraes and Jair Bolsonaro have history: The justice presided over the investigation, trial and conviction last year of the former president, an ally of President Donald Trump, for plotting a military coup after losing the 2022 election.
The release of the text messages this month has enabled Flávio Bolsonaro, long a court critic, to rally anger against the justices — and shift attention from his own ties to the banker, Daniel Vorcaro.
Text and audio messages released in May revealed that the younger Bolsonaro asked Vorcaro last year for millions of dollars to support Dark Horse, a U.S.-produced film intended to rehabilitate his father’s image, while the Banco Master owner was under investigation in the alleged $10.2 billion fraud.
Bolsonaro called Vorcaro “brother” and visited him while the banker was under house arrest with an electronic ankle monitor.
The text messages released this month by Justice André Mendonça, the Bolsonaro appointee who’s leading the investigation into Banco Master, revealed that Vorcaro sought advice from Moraes while he was under federal scrutiny, asked the justice shortly before his arrest last year whether he should flee the country, and thanked him.
The messages from Vorcaro to Moraes were sent as screenshots viewable once only in WhatsApp. Because investigators had access only to Vorcaro’s phone, it’s not clear whether Moraes responded or how. The law firm of Viviane Barci de Moraes, the justice’s wife, has done legal work for companies linked to Vorcaro.
Alexandre de Moraes’ prosecutions against online disinformation and attacks against the electoral system have brought him into conflict with the Bolsonaros. He has not commented publicly on the messages, but accused Mendonça of abusing his authority to target him and asked Chief Justice Edson Fachin to investigate.
Federal Police investigators accuse Mendonça of “interference” in the Banco Master probe.
The crisis quickly escalated. Mendonça suspended Federal Police Chief Andrei Rodrigues. Another justice overturned the order. Fachin has now called for the full court to address the dispute on Tuesday.
Neither Moraes nor Mendonça responded to requests for comment.
Vorcaro built Banco Master with deep roots in Brazil’s political right. It was authorized to operate in 2019, during Jair Bolsonaro’s presidency; 17 of the 19 state and local governments that did business with it were controlled by the right.
Now Flávio Bolsonaro is trying to turn that history on its head by claiming Moraes is corrupt and aligned with Lula. “Anyone who votes for Lula is voting for Alexandre de Moraes,” he shouted Monday to an Independence Day crowd in São Paulo.
Moraes was appointed by conservative President Michel Temer in 2017. No evidence linking Lula to the Banco Master scandal has been made public.
“With Bolsonarismo back in the presidential race … the Supreme Court will inevitably be part of the political fight,” the sociologist and political analyst Celso Rocha de Barros said. “And when a corruption scandal emerges involving the justice who put Bolsonaro in prison, it takes on a whole new dimension.”
“The problem,” Rocha said, “is that much of the public does not understand that the justice who put Bolsonaro in prison and Flávio Bolsonaro are now caught up in the same scandal.”
A court document unsealed this week showed that the Supreme Court has been investigating Flávio Bolsonaro since July for alleged money laundering, tax evasion and corruption. Investigators say he asked Vorcaro for $24 million and received $12.3 million.
Bolsonaro has acknowledged the communication but denies wrongdoing. The film, he said, was financed privately.
Investigators are also looking into whether the money was used to cover the expenses of his brother Eduardo. The former congressman moved to the United States last year to lobby the Trump administration about their father’s case.
Flávio Bolsonaro is running for president in part to free Jair Bolsonaro from his 27-year sentence for attempting the violent abolition of democratic rule of law and other violations. The plot included plans to assassinate Lula.
Polls show Flávio Bolsonaro, 45, pulling into a statistical tie with Lula, 80. They’re expected to finish first and second Oct. 4 among a crowded field in first-round voting. It was Lula who defeated the elder Bolsonaro in 2022 in the closest presidential election in Brazil’s history.
Trump tried last year to pressure Lula and Moraes into dropping the case against Jair Bolsonaro by imposing sanctions against senior Brazilian officials and some Brazilian products, but the attempt backfired. Lula said he couldn’t interfere with the independent judiciary, and rallied voters against what he characterized as a foreign attack on Brazil’s sovereignty encouraged by the Bolsonaros.
Trump has since eased some of the sanctions and spoken warmly of Lula. The U.S. president welcomed Flávio Bolsonaro at the Oval Office in May, but has not formally endorsed him, as he did his father.
Amid Trump’s intervention, news of Bolsonaro’s appeal to Vorcaro and a family dispute made public by his father’s wife, his stepmother, the challenger has trailed the incumbent in polls by a few percentage points for most of the race. But the messages connecting Vorcaro with Moraes appear to have helped him close the gap.
At the outset of the campaign, Flávio Bolsonaro cast himself as a more measured version of his divisive father. Jair Bolsonaro has insulted women, gays, Indigenous people and Afro-Brazilians; railed against vaccines; and spoken admiringly of the military dictatorship he served as a young army officer.
“I’m grounded — more inclined toward dialogue and to build bridges,” Flávio Bolsonaro told The Washington Post in April. “I’m the Bolsonaro you always wanted.”
But as the campaign has ground on, he has tacked further right, with populist rhetoric now indistinguishable from his father’s. He denies that there was an attempted coup; he has said the justices were given “superpowers” to remove Bolsonaro “with this lie.” He has refused to say whether he would accept the election results if he loses.
Lula’s advisers have urged him to keep his distance from the Supreme Court crisis. With Brazil’s economy slowing and Federal Police investigating an alleged influence-peddling scheme involving his son Lulinha, he’s running instead on a message of defending the country’s sovereignty. (Lulinha has denied wrongdoing.)
Lula has highlighted Bolsonaro’s ties to Vorcaro and called for the allegations against the court to be investigated and made public. Speaking this week to the television channel SBT News, he condemned “selective leaks that affect the electoral race.”
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