Brazil’s Supreme Court crisis moves into the presidential race

Brazil’s Supreme Federal Court enters this week with sessions cancelled, justices overruling one another, and the Banco Master collapse sitting inside the October presidential campaign.

The Associated Press described the crisis as unprecedented. The court is due to meet on Tuesday, 16 September, to discuss whether one justice should be investigated for corruption. That hearing is the immediate event. The wider fight is over who controls the court after the election.

Banco Master, a mid-sized bank with assets once put as high as $16 billion, was shut in November after a fraud inquiry measured in billions of reais. Former banker Daniel Vorcaro is at the centre. Investigations have tied him to payments that financed the film Dark Horse for Senator Flávio Bolsonaro, the son of former president Jair Bolsonaro and now a leading candidate. Justice Alexandre de Moraes, long treated as a defender of the 2022 result against Jair Bolsonaro, gave legal advice to Vorcaro. Moraes’s wife held a 130 million reais contract, about $23 million, to provide legal services to the bank, according to documents in the inquiry.

Justice André Mendonça, a Jair Bolsonaro appointee, last week disclosed a report on alleged contact between Moraes and Vorcaro and called for an investigation. Moraes answered by asking the court to investigate Mendonça for abuse of authority, citing Federal Police intelligence reports. On 8 September Mendonça ordered the preventive suspension of Federal Police chief Andrei Rodrigues and intelligence chief Leandro Almada, saying those reports were illegal. A five-member panel majority backed him: Mendonça, Kassio Nunes Marques and Luiz Fux. The Lula government appealed to court president Edson Fachin. Institutional Relations Minister José Guimarães called the suspension electoral in smell.

Commentary in Valor Econômico has gone further. Columnist Bruno Carazza wrote that evidence in the Master file also points at Justices Dias Toffoli and Kassio Nunes Marques receiving, directly or indirectly, multimillion-real sums from Vorcaro, and that Gilmar Mendes and André Mendonça sit as partners in companies built to connect politicians and business. Law firms linked to relatives of Luiz Fux and Cristiano Zanin add conflict claims. Those are allegations in print, not convictions. They are now part of the public file the court cannot ignore.

President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is trying to stand clear of the names. On SBT he said that if Moraes, Mendonça or Fachin is guilty, each must pay. In Curitiba he said no one should join the court to get rich. He has added judicial reform, including fixed terms for future justices, to his campaign list. Flávio Bolsonaro presents himself as a target of persecution and as the candidate who will reshape the court. A Datafolha poll on Friday put Lula at 39 percent in the first round and Flávio at 35 percent, both moves inside the two-point margin from the previous week.

The court has 11 justices. Appointments last until age 75. Whoever wins in October will inherit vacancies and a Senate that is expected to sit further to the right in 2027. That is why reform talk is not abstract. A president who campaigns against the court still needs the Senate to confirm new names. A candidate who campaigns to break the court still needs a legal path that survives a later review.

Tuesday’s meeting will not settle Banco Master. It will show whether the court can investigate one of its own without splitting into campaign camps. If it cannot, the election will treat the court as a spoil rather than as a referee. That is the risk both campaigns are already pricing.