‘He’s always on the attack’: the Brazilian judge prosecuting Bolsonaro inspires both love and hate | Brazil

Tattoo artist Bruno Ferreira has inked numerous superheroes and superstars on to Brazilian our bodies throughout his 25-year profession: Marvel Lady, Batman, Ayrton Senna and Pelé.However when Adauto Gomes Nascimento marched into his studio earlier this yr, he had a unique persona in thoughts: a muscular, shaven-headed supreme court docket choose referred to as Alexandre de Moraes, who’s now one among Brazil’s largest and most controversial celebrities.“He means all the pieces to me. He’s somebody who sticks up for Brazil … He’s a great particular person and a great choose,” stated Nascimento, a 37-year-old butcher from the Amazon metropolis of Belém, explaining why he spent six hours and three,000 reais (£410, $550) to get Moraes’s face immortalized on his shin.If tattooing a supreme court docket choose’s face on to your leg appears a peculiar choice, Brazil’s distinctive political panorama helps clarify Nascimento’s selection.Moraes is the choose presiding over the historic trial of Jair Bolsonaro, which started within the capital Brasília final week. And Moraes’s quest to carry Brazil’s ex-president to account for allegedly engineering a coup after he misplaced the 2022 election to his arch-rival, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, has made the pugnacious, muay thai-fighting Justice of the Peace a hero – and even a intercourse image – for progressives and a hated determine for Bolsonaro’s devotees.Even Elon Musk, one among Bolsonaro’s most well-known international followers, has referred to as the 56-year-old jurist “an evil dictator cosplaying as a choose” and “Brazil’s Darth Vader”, and in contrast him to the Harry Potter villain Lord Voldemort.“He intrigues and fascinates his detractors and his admirers in equal measure,” stated the journalist Thais Bilenky, who made a six-part podcast about Moraes referred to as Alexandre. “I don’t assume there’s anybody who evokes a lot love and a lot hate, a lot worry and a lot admiration, as him.”Adauto Gomes Nascimento’s tattoo Alexandre de Moraes inked on his leg, on 20 August 2025. {Photograph}: Alessandro Falco/The GuardianMoraes’s path to turning into one among Brazil’s most influential and contentious figures begins in São Paulo in 1986 – a yr after democracy was restored following 20 years of navy rule. That was when a teenage Moraes enrolled at Brazil’s prime regulation faculty – an elite establishment that has educated a 3rd of the nation’s 39 presidents – and took his first steps in direction of turning into a family identify recognized merely as “Xandão”, or “Massive Al”.At this time, many leftwing Brazilians hail Moraes because the saviour of the world’s fifth largest democracy. However throughout his college days Moraes was a person of the appropriate. “The very last thing he would have had in his room was a Che poster!” his good friend Floriano de Azevedo Marques Neto advised the French newspaper Le Monde in 2023.After graduating, Moraes constructed a fame as a no-nonsense workaholic – and an enviable CV. He got here first within the entrance examination to turn into a public prosecutor and, in his late 20s, proved his mettle by taking up one among Brazil’s strongest politicians, São Paulo’s then mayor, Paulo Maluf, throughout a corruption investigation referred to as “Chickengate”. Moraes additionally discovered time to put in writing a 1,000-page tome about constitutional regulation that bought a whole bunch of 1000’s of copies.In 2002, at age 33, Moraes moved into politics, turning into the youngest justice secretary in São Paulo’s historical past. Amongst his missions was to wash up the state’s abuse-ridden younger offender establishments. Eloísa Machado, a regulation professor who then labored as a human rights lawyer defending incarcerated teenagers, recalled her first encounter with Moraes, in early 2005. After she denounced torture in a single detention centre, Moraes went there in particular person and ordered the arrest of greater than 20 employees. “It was the primary time [in Brazil] that anybody had been arrested on the spot for torturing youngsters,” Machado stated, including: “He’s all the time had this combative profile.”By 2015, Moraes’s fame was spreading. He grew to become São Paulo’s public safety secretary – a job that gave him management over policing in Brazil’s largest metropolis and most populous state – and was vilified by leftists for what they thought of his authoritarian response to protests towards the impeachment of Brazil’s leftwing president Dilma Rousseff. On one event, Moraes in contrast leftist demonstrators to guerrillas.Opposition politicians had been aghast when Rousseff’s successor, the conservative Michel Temer, invited Moraes to be his justice minister in 2016, and, a yr later, appointed the 48-year-old because the supreme court docket’s youngest member. Gleisi Hoffmann, an in depth Lula ally, referred to as Moraes a risk to democracy.Bolsonaro supporters throughout a protest towards the federal government of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Brasília on 3 August 2025. {Photograph}: Ueslei Marcelino/The GuardianBut such unhealthy blood was quickly forgotten. After Bolsonaro took energy in January 2019, Moraes rapidly grew to become probably the most energetic and efficient opponents of the far-right politician’s authoritarian designs.He ran a collection of supreme court docket investigations into the president and his allies; blocked social media accounts belonging to far-right activists; and ordered controversial police raids on rich Bolsonaro supporters suspected of discussing a coup.On the eve of the 2022 election – broadly seen as probably the most consequential in Brazilian historical past – Moraes grew to become president of the court docket answerable for organizing elections and was broadly credited with taking decisive motion to maintain the vote on observe, regardless of Bolsonaro’s alleged try and steal it.On the day of the election’s essential second spherical, Moraes helped frustrate an alleged try to make use of freeway police to impede Lula voters, by threatening to arrest their commander. When Bolsonaro supporters ran riot on 8 January 2023, after Lula’s inauguration, the choose suspended Brasília’s governor as federal authorities battled to regain management.“Brazil owes him quite a bit,” the supreme court docket choose Gilmar Mendes stated of Moraes not too long ago, reflecting the broadly held view that his colleague had been instrumental in defending democracy.Hardcore Bolsonaristas disagree – and even some progressives fear Moraes might have overstepped his constitutional authority in his campaign to guard democracy. A sprawling supreme court docket inquiry into faux information – created in 2019 to deal with an explosion of far-right misinformation – has been beneath means for six years and it stays unclear when the investigation may conclude, or exactly who has been focused, and why.At protests, Bolsonaristas wield placards claiming their nation has turn into “a judicial dictatorship” and hurl insults and obscenities at Moraes. “He’s the uncircumcised son of Belial!” one pro-Bolsonaro marcher, Francisco Antônio, fumed at a current rally within the capital.Alexandre de Moraes in court docket in Brasília on 20 August. {Photograph}: André Borges/EPASebastião Coelho, a retired Bolsonarista choose, accused Moraes of trampling on the structure and demanded his impeachment: “Alexandre de Moraes isn’t a choose … He’s a prison who’s laying waste to our nation.”Officers in Donald Trump’s administration have echoed that rhetoric, accusing Moraes and his fellow judges of main a “witch-hunt” towards the US president’s South American ally. In July Moraes was sanctioned by the US treasury for allegedly main “an oppressive marketing campaign of censorship, arbitrary detentions that violate human rights and politicized prosecutions – together with towards former president Jair Bolsonaro”.Those that have tracked Moraes’s profession doubt such stress will make him collapse over Bolsonaro’s trial, which is because of conclude on 12 September, with a conviction and hefty sentence thought doubtless.“He’s a strong one that isn’t afraid – he’s all the time on the assault,” Nascimento, the Amazon butcher, stated of the person tattooed on to his limb. “I like this about him too. He actually goes for it … He will get issues sorted.”