Brazil's Flavio Bolsonaro turns scandal into poll gains

Despite being caught up in an explosive financial scandal that has dominated Brazil's election campaign, candidate Flavio Bolsonaro has gained ground with less than two weeks to go before the vote.

After months trailing leftist President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva in the polls, the 45-year-old senator is nipping at his heels in what is shaping up to be a knife-edge race.

A survey published Monday by the Quaest pollster showed the right-wing candidate would secure 42 percent of voter support in a hypothetical October 25 runoff vote, compared to 41 percent for Lula.

This gap falls within the poll's margin of error.

Flavio Bolsonaro, son of jailed far-right former president Jair Bolsonaro, is under investigation for suspected corruption and money laundering over the financing of a film about his father.

The biopic was bankrolled by Daniel Vorcaro, a jailed banker who is accused of orchestrating one of Brazil's largest financial fraud cases.

However, it is another one of Vorcaro's many allegedly dubious relationships revealed by investigations that has eclipsed the accusations against Bolsonaro and hurt Lula's campaign.

A police report showed numerous conversations in which Vorcaro sought help in the fraud probe against him from a phone number which investigators linked to powerful Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes.

Moraes, who led the trial which saw Jair Bolsonaro convicted for an attempted coup after his election loss in 2022, is a hated figure among the right.

"Flavio comes out of this scandal in better shape than Lula," political analyst Andre Rosa told AFP. 

He said the Bolsonarists had managed to get "the somewhat undecided voter to end up associating Lula's image with that of Moraes. This gives Flavio Bolsonaro some breathing room right now."

"Voting for Lula means voting for Moraes," Flavio Bolsonaro said last week.

Lula has repeatedly stated that if the justice is "guilty, he must pay."

However, he maintains that "Alexandre de Moraes has done an extraordinary job safeguarding democracy."

A study by the data analytics firm Datrix showed that social media mentions regarding Moraes and the crisis in the Supreme Federal Court (STF) had overtaken those referring to Banco Master and Flavio Bolsonaro.

Senator Rogerio Marinho, Flavio Bolsonaro's campaign manager, branded Moraes a "pop star of the left."

"Moraes and Lula are two sides of the same coin, and that is the Brazilian population's perception," he told a group of journalists.

Analysts say the crisis at the STF has reinforced distrust of institutions, which has hit Lula's campaign harder.

"The general image reaching the public is: politics is a swamp of corruption... nobody does anything," said Geraldo Monteiro, an expert at the State University of Rio de Janeiro.

In addition, he said Lula's campaign had been "a bit lackluster."

"The STF crisis is not our crisis. They are trying to pin it on us," Marco Aurelio de Carvalho, one of Lula's campaign coordinators, told AFP.

Lula last week drew criticism for announcing an increase in benefits under the government's social welfare program so close to the October 4 first round of voting.

He also announced free GLP-1 weight-loss drugs under the public healthcare system, which one columnist on the UOL news site said was a bid to "fatten his popularity."

Laercio Barbosa, a 70-year-old chemistry teacher who plans to vote for Lula, is worried.

He told AFP at a campaign rally that the president "needs to realize that today, unfortunately, anti-establishment rhetoric is in the hands of the right."