When Brazilians go to the polls on Sunday (4) to choose the next president, the atmosphere will be one of discouragement and uncertainty.
One of the reasons is the options available. The two favorites, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT), the current president, and Flávio Bolsonaro (PL), an ultra-right senator and son of a former president, represent the two camps that have dominated every election since 2018. Neither of them offers anything new, much less a vision of the future.
But there is another reason for disenchantment. Once again, a Brazilian election takes place in the midst of a gigantic corruption scandal.
A year ago, Brazilians discovered that Banco Master, owned by Daniel Vorcaro, was, in practice, a gigantic financial pyramid scheme. He drained R$60 billion from the financial system and supported himself thanks to a wide network of favors, dubious contracts and bribes. Since then, the tentacles of Vorcaro, a young banker with a taste for private jets, lavish parties and European escorts, have reached officials across the political spectrum.
One of them is Flávio Bolsonaro himself, who admitted to having received at least R$61 million from the banker, supposedly to make a film about his father, Jair. There is no evidence that Lula had improper relations with the owner of Banco Master, but several of his allies were accused of this, including the leader of his government in the Senate (Jacques Wagner), a former Minister of Justice (Ricardo Lewadnowski) and a former Minister of Finance (Guido Mantega).
Big scandals are nothing new for Brazilians. The last two decades have produced many of them. The monthly allowance, in 2005, involved clandestine payments made by Lula's Workers' Party (PT) to allies in Congress in exchange for their votes.
Ten years later, the Lava Jato operation, an anti-corruption investigation, revealed a billion-dollar bribery scheme structured around contracts that construction companies, especially Odebrecht, signed with Petrobras, the state-controlled oil giant. The PT was at the center of the scheme, but the money reached many other parties, and the operation spread to a dozen countries.
Still, even by the standards of a country that follows scandals like soap operas, the Banco Master case is extraordinary. The main reason is the unprecedented involvement of ministers from the Federal Supreme Court.
The most prominent of them is Alexandre de Moraes, who led the process that resulted in the conviction of Jair Bolsonaro and other defendants for attempted coup d'état. Moraes' wife signed a R$131 million contract with Banco Master, although there is no evidence that any service was provided.
She also received ownership interests in a plane and a helicopter, allegedly as payment. Even more incriminating: the banker's phone contained 52 messages suggesting that it was Moraes himself who acted as Vorcaro's lawyer — which he denies. The two apparently even discussed an escape plan to keep the banker out of prison.
I have been covering power in Brazil as a journalist for 30 years. I followed all these cases closely and was the first to draw attention to Banco Master's schemes. Still, I was impressed by Vorcaro's conviction that he could buy anyone and by the aggressiveness of his attempts.
In April 2025, one of his allies offered me a job worth millions, but I knew that was nothing more than an attempt to keep me away from journalism and prevent the publication of the reports that bothered him.
Only a year later, when he was already in prison, I found out that he had also ordered my life to be investigated and my children and partner investigated. To his disappointment, the search turned up nothing, not even a traffic ticket.
The Master case and its arrival at the STF caused enormous damage. Brazilians, already fed up with scandals, are losing trust in their institutions. The case exposed an influence peddling market operated from law firms run by relatives or friends of ministers. It also exposed an incestuous relationship between judges and lawyers that has always existed, but which has been tolerated and reinforced over the years.
During Jair Bolsonaro's Presidency, Brazilian society relegated this mix of conflicts of interest and corruption to a secondary position on its list of concerns, in the face of more urgent priorities.
The first was to prevent the then president's denialism from deepening the tragedy of the Covid-19 pandemic and ensure that vaccines reach as many people as possible. The second was to resist the coup movements that intended to establish a dictatorship and keep Bolsonaro in power.
Today, however, many Brazilians ask themselves why they should support and respect a STF that used the power that society entrusted to it to allow itself to be co-opted by a persistent embezzler. The contamination of the court is an evident symptom of the fragility of Brazilian democracy and one of the main reasons for the dismay and anger of voters.
This does not mean that there is no way out. A consensus is already beginning to emerge that Brazil needs a broad reform of the Judiciary. It must not only create new anti-corruption rules, but also limit the power of judges who today behave as if they were above the law. It must also guarantee the independence of State bodies responsible for combating corruption, which is weakened each time an investigation reaches someone with power and influence.
Equally urgent is a Budget reform that prevents Congress from controlling more discretionary spending than the Executive itself. This would help, to some extent, to restore the system of checks and balances on which the health of Brazilian institutions depends.
These are complex tasks, especially because they will require great detachment and public spirit from many people who, until now, have only thought about themselves. But they need to understand that this is no longer a question of choice, but of their own survival — and the survival of Brazilian democracy.
