Henrik Brandão Jönsson: The man who sentenced Bolsonaro could cost Lula the presidency

When the right-wing nationalist Jair Bolsonaro was president of Brazil, Alexandre de Moraes was seen as the antithesis of institutional power. He investigated Bolsonaro's troll factories, fined American tech companies that did not delete fake accounts and had several of Bolsonaro's most vocal supporters arrested. When Bolsonaro mentioned the judge by name, there was smoke from the ears. He called him "the dictator" and "Lula's useful idiot".\n\nDuring the storming of Brasília almost four years ago, when thousands of Bolsonaro supporters entered the government buildings to depose Lula da Silva, the most extreme Bolsonarians targeted the Supreme Court. They ran up the stairs and looked for Morae's office. One of the followers stepped onto his desk, took off his pants, squatted down, and relieved himself. The hatred of Alexandre de Moraes was greater than that of Lula da Silva.\n\nAs hated as he was by the far right, he was loved by the left. After the coup attempt, Moraes acted quickly, disbanding the right-wing nationalists' camp outside the army headquarters, deposing the capital's governor and ensuring that the supporters who stormed the government buildings were detained. When he then sentenced Jair Bolsonaro to 27 years in prison for the coup attempt, he was seen by the left as the man who saved Brazil's democracy.\n\nThen broke the biggest banking scandal Brazil has ever experienced. The financier Daniel Vorcaro, who charmed both the right and the left with his wealth, had embezzled over one hundred billion kroner from, among other things, public employee pension funds. When the scandal broke, it turned out that Flávio Bolsonaro had asked for over two hundred million kroner to finance a film about his father Jair Bolsonaro.\n\nFlávio Bolsonaro enjoyed having the judge in the Supreme Court taken with his pants down\n\nWhat then surprised Brazil was that the banker also had close contact with Moraes. The weekend before the banker was to be arrested, Vorcaro sent a message to the Supreme Court judge asking him for advice on how to proceed. Would he leave the country before he was arrested? That a wanted banker had such close contact with one of the Supreme Court judges shocked Brazil.\n\nWhen it turned out that Morae's wife was the financier's lawyer, it became too much. Her law firm had received almost a quarter of a billion kroner from the financier without having done any work.\n\nWhat was seen as the most embarrassing was how the disclosure was made. In order for Moraes to hide his contact with the financier, he did not send regular chat messages. He wrote a note on his cell phone, took a picture and sent it. The image was only shown once before it disappeared.\n\nFederal police used the Israeli program Cellebrite to access temporary files on the financier's cell phone, prompting parts of the left to believe in a conspiracy theory that Israel was behind the leak. Flávio Bolsonaro enjoyed the fact that the judge in the Supreme Court was caught with his pants down and proved to be as corrupt as the Bolsonaro family is suspected to be.\n\nLula da Silva defended Moraes and said that "he did great services for Brazil in the name of democracy". That support is believed to be one of the reasons why Lula da Silva made one of his worst ever elections on Sunday. In three weeks, when the decisive round of elections is held, he risks losing an election as a sitting president for the first time and being forced to leave the presidential palace.\n\nRead more:\nThe orange wave washes over Brazil