The Master scandal and Lula's electoral career in Brazil

Politics is like a cloud. When you look at it a second time, it has already changed places. And if even with satellites and supercomputers meteorology cannot predict what the weather will be like, what can we say about political science when it tries to predict an election. After the storm, yes, just rewind the images to find the exact point where it began to form. With the economy in a great moment and the country far from the coup threat, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva had everything to reach this Sunday, October 4, with the wind in his favor in the dispute for his fourth term. Instead, he arrives pressed against Flávio Bolsonaro, an adversary little more than half his age and not even a shadow of his political talent, but who bears the surname of another great Brazilian political force. Now, with data that no one had before, we can identify the exact moment when the current scenario was formed.

On November 15, a little-known banker wrote to a number saved in his cell phone as “Alexandre de Moraes,” the best-known and divisive judge of the Supreme Federal Court: “Do you think I have to be out on Monday?” On Monday he insisted: “Did you manage to block [my arrest]?” It was confirmed that the number that banker used was Moraes's, but the judge denies having received the messages. That night, the banker was detained at the São Paulo airport when he was about to board his private plane to Dubai. Only then did the country learn about Daniel Vorcaro, accused of the largest financial fraud in Brazilian history. The next day, the Central Bank liquidated Banco Master and revealed a hole of more than 50,000 million reais (9,600 million dollars) that even took away civil servants' pensions.

Vorcaro was then a new character in a soap opera that had another protagonist: Alexandre de Moraes himself. And it would take months to learn that the banker's scandal was also that of the judge. Five days later, Moraes himself decreed the preventive detention of Jair Bolsonaro, already sentenced to 27 years for attempted coup d'état, who had tried to break his electronic anklet with a soldering pencil. Two weeks later, from his cell, Bolsonaro anointed his son Flávio as the candidate, who started with 18% of voting intentions.

Lula, meanwhile, was negotiating with Donald Trump the end of the tariffs on Brazil and the sanctions on Moraes, punishments encouraged by the then deputy Eduardo Bolsonaro, the most deceitful of Jair's sons. It backfired: the right, after years wrapped in the flag, was left as a traitor to the country, and Lula, with the speech of sovereignty, went out of the red to tie approval and disapproval. In December, Trump lifted sanctions on Moraes. That same week, the judge went from hero to villain: it was learned that Vorcaro's bank had hired his wife's law firm for 129 million reais (25 million dollars).

But the nationalist flame was not enough for almost a year of electoral career. The population does not feel the good numbers of the Government in their pockets: unemployment, at 5.3%, is around the historical minimum, but debts, also a record, take up almost 30% of income.

Lula also pays to be Lula. In seven presidential campaigns, the opposition changed its face and values ​​several times, but the enemy was always him. He is attributed with everything that the right calls corruption: the literal one, although his convictions were annulled, and the moral one, because he embodies a progressive camp that calls for gender equality, legal abortion and sexual freedom.

For the left, Lula removed millions of people from the hunger maps, opened the university to the poor and concluded his mandate in 2010, with more than 80% approval. They cling to it out of gratitude, out of nostalgia and because it is what there is against the extreme right, but it has not been exciting beyond its most loyal followers for a long time. It was Moraes, a man from the right, who gave the left what it was missing: quick action against Bolsonaro's coup and someone to cheer with enthusiasm.

Now that his name appears on Vorcaro's cell phone, the left lost the discourse that democracy and morality were on its side. The right won twice. He linked Lula to Moraes, the judge who imprisoned his adversary, and subsequently to the Master case, although there was nothing against him. And he found in the judge's misfortune how to deflect the cannon that was aimed at his candidate, Flávio, the most involved of Jair's sons.

What weighs against Flávio is worse than corruption: he decorated paramilitaries accused of murder, employed relatives of the alleged head of a group of hitmen in his office, and allocated public money to an NGO linked to those convicted of the murder of councilor Marielle Franco. But those old scandals, now annulled or archived, seem like a game next to the $24 million he asked Vorcaro for, supposedly for a film about his father. Some ended up in a fund in Texas, and the police are investigating whether that money, including that of retirees, paid for his brother Eduardo's stay in the United States while he conspired against Brazil.

The Master case was not a lightning strike on one side, but a whirlpool that crossed all the signals. The nationalist right asks Trump for help. The right born from the anti-corruption crusade defends a candidate entangled in corruption. The left pays for having fallen in love with a punitive judge. And those who defend the secular State breathe thanks to the rumor that Flávio would take away the title of patron saint of Brazil from the Virgin of Aparecida.

But the election will be decided by voters with whom neither side talks, people attentive to the concrete things in life: the unpayable rent, the food that does not come down, the bus that arrives late, full and suffocating, the medical exam that should take 30 days, not 30 months. People who do not review the satellite images to understand how the events were chained. People who look at the sky and simply ask themselves: How is the day today?