Sergio Moro, the former federal judge whose handling of the Lava Jato (Car Wash) corruption cases made him an anti-corruption icon celebrated by conservative politicians, won the governorship of Paraná on Sunday without a runoff. He took 50.10 percent of valid votes to 25.37 percent for Sandro Alex, the candidate backed by Gov. Ratinho Júnior, and 23.47 percent for Requião Filho, who had the Workers' Party's support. Moro, a Liberal Party senator, finished about 6,800 votes above the majority required to win outright, out of more than 6.2 million valid votes.
Gazeta do Povo reported that the outcome was not confirmed until 99.87 percent of polling sections had been totaled, in a slow count decided vote by vote. The last polls in the state had shown Moro short of a first-round win, with a runoff against Alex or Requião Filho the likeliest result, according to SBT News. Ratinho Júnior, who has governed Paraná for eight years and could not run again, had backed Alex as his successor.
Speaking at the regional electoral court's headquarters in Curitiba, Moro thanked voters for what he called a first-round victory "against the whole machine and all the lies" and said his campaign had been clean. "Paraná has no owner," he said. "This election was never about Ratinho Júnior." Flávio Bolsonaro, the Liberal Party's presidential candidate and the eldest son of former President Jair Bolsonaro, backed Moro during the campaign and recorded a video saying the former judge was his only candidate in the state.
Moro's ticket also took both of Paraná's Senate seats. Filipe Barros, a Liberal Party congressman, led with 27.25 percent, and Dallagnol, of the Novo party, was second with 25.14 percent, both of them allies who ran on Moro's slate. Gleisi Hoffmann, a former national president of the Workers' Party who served as Lula's minister of institutional relations, finished fourth with 13.35 percent, behind Alexandre Curi of the Republicanos. O Globo reported that Hoffmann ran with Lula's support and attacked Moro during the campaign by tying him to the effects of Lava Jato.
Dallagnol's seat is not settled. The electoral court's final tally lists him as elected, but his votes were counted under a registration classified as approved pending appeal, and their validity depends on a ruling by the full Superior Electoral Court. If the court finds him ineligible, his entire ticket would be barred from taking office, his alternates could not take the seat and Paraná could have to hold a new Senate election, G1 reported.
The dispute goes back to 2023, when the same court unanimously struck down the registration under which Dallagnol had won a seat in the lower house the year before, and he lost the seat. The case's rapporteur concluded that Dallagnol had committed fraud against Brazil's Clean Record Law by resigning from the federal prosecution service 11 months before the 2022 election. At the time he was facing internal proceedings that could have led to his dismissal, which would have made him ineligible. This year a regional electoral court approved his Senate candidacy 4 to 3 on Sept. 8, and rival tickets appealed to the national court. Since Sept. 19 an injunction had barred him from public campaign events, radio and television advertising and public party and campaign funds, and on Sept. 21 the full court voted 5 to 2 to keep it in place.
On Saturday night, the eve of the vote, Justice Floriano de Azevedo Marques, acting alone, rejected Dallagnol's registration and ordered the votes for his ticket treated as void. He was granting appeals from the federation that includes the Workers' Party in Paraná and from a rival coalition. The day before, the Electoral Prosecutor General's office had argued for keeping the candidacy. On Sunday morning, after an appeal by Dallagnol's lawyers, the court's president, Justice Kassio Nunes Marques, suspended the order. He did not decide whether Dallagnol is eligible. Instead he held that a single justice's ruling could not take definitive effect before the full court weighed in, and he faulted its timing on the night before the election, when the voting machines were already prepared.
"They left me 15 days without campaigning, 15 days without asking for votes, which is the most basic thing in an election," Dallagnol told reporters in Curitiba on Sunday evening. "Even so, Paraná did not bend." He also vowed not to bow to what he called "the system of abuse, of corruption and of judicial arbitrariness."
Moro, 54, convicted Lula of passive corruption and money laundering in the case of a triplex apartment in Guarujá, a proceeding the Supreme Court later annulled. The Lava Jato cases sent Lula, then a former president, to prison. Messages between Moro and the task force's prosecutors, published by The Intercept in 2019, prompted challenges to his impartiality. In March 2021 the Supreme Court found that he had acted with bias in judging Lula in the triplex case. Dallagnol, 46, led the prosecutors' task force from 2014 to 2020.
Moro left the bench in 2018 to become Jair Bolsonaro's justice minister and quit in April 2020, accusing the then-president of political interference in the Federal Police. The two reconciled during the 2022 campaign, when Moro was running for the Senate. In March he moved from the União Brasil party to the Liberal Party after Ratinho Júnior's allies in the Progressistas party voted against his candidacy inside their party federation and nearly derailed it. His Senate seat will go to his alternate, Luis Felipe Cunha. When his term begins in 2027, he will face a state legislature that went along with nearly all of Ratinho Júnior's plans. Gazeta do Povo wrote that his first months in office would show whether the assembly stands with him or resents Alex's defeat.