Bruna Frascolla
After losing the support of liberal, Zionist evangelical, and Olavo de Carvalho-aligned leaders, Bolsonarism is now losing the support of Trump's leadership
It was a shock to the Brazilian Right to hear that Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes and his wife were removed from the OFAC sanctions list. This happened on Friday, December 12th, and in the same week, on Tuesday the 9th, the whole of Brazil was surprised by the news that Alexandre de Moraes' wife, lawyer Adriana Barci de Moraes, has a contract worth 129 million reais or 24 million dollars (3.6 million reais monthly for three years) with Banco Master. The latter is a bank investigated for fraud and is involved in a number of scandals. The timing for Trump to lift the sanctions on Moraes and his wife was the worst possible.
The most recent scandal, however, is not even of a police nature: Supreme Court Justice Dias Toffoli, appointed by Lula during his current term (and who was his personal lawyer before that), accepted the request from André Vorcaro, owner of Banco Master, to transfer the case from the ordinary courts to the Supreme Court - even though no one had privileged jurisdiction - and, immediately afterwards, decreed maximum secrecy. From this, the reader can see that there is a concord between Lulaism, Brazilian bankers, and the Supreme Court.
Up to this point, nothing particularly new (although Vorcaro and Banco Master have been in the news only recently). An interesting development is the negative news about Moraes being published by the newspaper of the powerful Grupo Globo, which is the main media conglomerate in Brazil (unlike the São Paulo newspapers, Globo has a TV station, which is the main one in the country). Globo's history is right-wing (it was the military regime that gave it a license to broadcast TV, for example), but it strongly opposed the Bolsonaro administration and, consequently, indirectly supports the Lula administration. Nevertheless, it is easy to perceive it as pro-Lula because it is an enthusiastic supporter of the woke agenda, which, in Brazil, includes a nominal defense of democracy. Together, Globo and the Lula's party tell a fable according to which Alexandre de Moraes and the Supreme Court saved democracy by preventing a bunch of unarmed old people from staging a coup d'état on January 8, 2023.
For the Brazilian public, the alliance between the Supreme Court, Lula's party, and legacy media is very clear, with its main political enemy being Bolsonarism allied with Trumpism. Much ink has been spilled in the Brazilian press to explain what happened with Trump. Some speak of handing over of rare earths, which Minister Fernando Haddad offered right at the beginning of the tariffs, but about which there is no concrete news (and it would be good for Trump to have something to show, after so much posturing). It is more plausible, however, that Venezuela is at stake - the emperor of Brazilian meat, Joesley Batista of JBS, traveled to Caracas on November 23 to talk to Maduro and ask him to resign, with both Washington and Brasilia being aware of this. It became news on Bloomberg on December 4. So, are rare earth elements and Venezuela sufficient reasons to explain Trump's withdrawal ? The Brazilian press found out that banker André Vorcaro's girlfriend was enjoying a barbecue with Ivanka Trump. Mystery, mystery.
The scenario is not easy at all for the bases of Lulaism and Bolsonarism. Imagine explaining to the leftist militants that Lula is an ally of Trump against Maduro, and to the Right that Trump traded Bolsonaro for Lula and Moraes.
The truth is that the lifting of the sanction against Moraes has caused Bolsonarism to split completely. As already explained in more detail here, Senator Flávio Bolsonaro's candidacy for president had been highlighting a coalition of financial market liberals, Zionist evangelicals, and Olavists (that is, the followers of a deceased cult leader who did neoconservative propaganda) in favor of a "center-right" candidacy that can only take off with the support of Jair Bolsonaro. By nominating his own son, Jair Bolsonaro thwarted the plans of this group. Now, with the failure of the campaign for the Magnistky Law (which, being applied, put Moraes on the OFAC list), the youngest evangelical star in politics, the parliamentarian-YouTuber Nikolas Ferreira, is already writing venomous indirect attacks against Eduardo Bolsonaro, who lobbied in the US for sanctions against Moraes.
The pressure has increased for Flávio Bolsonaro to give up his candidacy. It is possible that he will give up (since Bolsonarism is unpredictable), but it is possible that this group will have the same fate as João Dória and Joice Hasselmann. Both were elected with Bolsonaro's support, betrayed him, and ended their political careers (he is a former governor of São Paulo, and she went from a record-breaking congresswoman, elected with more than one million votes, to a failed city council candidate). On the other hand, there is a single group that managed to break with Bolsonarism without ceasing to exist in electoral politics: the MBL, which, despite the loss of votes, managed to elect congressmen and found a party. It must be said, however, that the movement looks like a digital marketing pyramid scheme and is very difficult to spread outside of hyper-connected urban centers. It doesn't seem to be an easy model for evangelicals outside of that profile to replicate.
As for Bolsonarism, the picture is becoming increasingly bizarre. After losing the support of liberal, Zionist evangelical, and Olavo de Carvalho-aligned leaders, it is now losing the support of Trump's leadership. Until proven otherwise, we have a personalistic vote-getting machine that has been rejected by all the "isms" with which it was associated.
Finally, we cannot fail to mention the shattering of Olavo de Carvalho's aura of infallibility. Obviously, he said a huge amount of nonsense in his lifetime (such as Pepsi being sweetened by cells from aborted fetuses), but a cult leader can pull off a clever maneuver to convince his audience that he is right even when he is wrong. In his last years, however, he insisted that Magnistky's Law was Brazil's salvation, the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. And so Magnitsky was removed by none other than Donald Trump - if it were another president, they would say it's the fault of communism. Now, only now, the right as a whole admits that Olavo isn't always right.