Brazil Flatlines at Its Worst-Ever Corruption Ranking as Mega-Scandals Engulf All Three Branches of Government
- Brazil scored 35 out of 100 on Transparency International’s 2025 Corruption Perceptions Index — its second-worst result since tracking began in 2012 — and remains stuck at 107th out of 182 countries.
- The watchdog blamed all three branches of government, citing the INSS pension fraud, the Banco Master banking scandal, ballooning congressional earmarks exceeding R$60 billion, and impunity even for confessed criminals.
- The global average dropped to a new low of 42, with established democracies including the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom also sliding to their worst scores on record.
Thirty-five points out of a hundred. That is Brazil’s grade on the world’s most widely cited corruption barometer — a score so low it places Latin America’s largest economy below the global average, below the Americas average, and in the company of Sri Lanka, Algeria and Laos. This is part of The Rio Times’ daily coverage of Brazil politics and Latin American financial news.
Released today by Transparency International, the 2025 Corruption Perceptions Index confirms what critics across the political spectrum have warned for years: Brazil is not getting cleaner, and no branch of government is blameless.
The one-point rise from last year’s record-low 34 is, in the organization’s own words, “statistically insignificant.” Brazil remains anchored at 107th place among 182 countries and territories, the worst ranking it has held since the current methodology was adopted in 2012.
A decade ago, the country scored 43 — eight points higher and 38 positions better. The decline has been steady, and the plateau at the bottom offers no comfort.
Bruno Brandão, executive director of Transparency International’s Brazil chapter, spread the blame across all three branches with unusual directness.
President Lula‘s administration, he acknowledged, advanced the use of financial intelligence to combat money laundering tied to organized crime. But the executive also “failed badly, allowing the capture of regulatory agencies and state-owned enterprises while maintaining political bargaining based on the earmarks binge.”
Congress weakened rather than strengthened anti-corruption tools — watering down the Clean Slate Law that bars convicted politicians from running for office, while earmarks ballooned past R$60 billion in the 2026 budget.
And the Supreme Court, while playing an important role in imposing some transparency on congressional spending, “continues to guarantee widespread impunity in mega-corruption cases, including confessed ones, while its own justices appear with highly suspicious ties to corrupt companies with cases before the Court.”
The scandals that shaped this year’s score are staggering in scale. The INSS pension fraud — in which unauthorized deductions were systematically siphoned from retirees’ benefits — caused an estimated R$6.3 billion in losses.
The Lula government’s response was widely criticized as slow and politically compromised, with the social security agency’s own director having dismissed warnings months before the scandal broke. The Banco Master affair, described as the largest banking fraud in Brazilian history, exposed structural vulnerabilities in financial oversight.
And earmark-related investigations uncovered corruption rings operating across at least five states, linking congressional leaders to money laundering through public contracts.
A companion report, the Retrospectiva 2025, documents what Transparency International calls the deepening infiltration of organized crime into the Brazilian state, particularly through the financial system and the legal profession.
The organization sees the earmarks system as the central mechanism of institutional capture — destroying Brazil’s capacity for evidence-based policymaking while funneling billions to municipalities without the capacity to manage the funds or prevent diversion.
Brazil’s stagnation unfolds against a deteriorating global backdrop. The worldwide CPI average fell to 42 this year — the first decline in over a decade. Only five countries now score above 80, down from twelve a decade ago.
Even established democracies are backsliding: the United States hit its lowest score ever at 64, Canada slipped to 75, and the United Kingdom dropped to 70.
Denmark led the rankings for the eighth consecutive year with 89 points, followed by Finland at 88 and Singapore at 84. At the bottom, Somalia and South Sudan tied at 9, with Venezuela at 10.
The regional comparison is particularly unflattering. Brazil scores seven points below both the Americas and the global average of 42. Argentina, navigating its own political upheaval, sits one point higher at 36. Even newly included countries like Brunei and Belize debuted above Brazil.
Transparency International’s recommendations range from investigating earmark irregularities and installing a joint congressional inquiry into Banco Master, to establishing a code of conduct for Supreme Court justices and redistributing sensitive cases away from judges with potential conflicts of interest.
Whether any of it materializes before Brazil’s 2026 elections — when corruption should, by any rational measure, be a central issue — will reveal more about the country’s trajectory than any index can.
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