“There is no judiciary in the world stronger than that of Brazil,” said Alexandre de Moraes. An STF minister’s Napoleonic daydreams were made public at an event this week to explain to the public why the judiciary suffers constant attacks from its “enemies”. It is, according to Moraes, a reaction commensurate with the greatness of the institution — which he could have praised as “energetic,” “independent,” “unbreakable” or dozens of other adjectives that his expansive vocabulary as a judge certainly carries. He preferred to say that the reason for this is that the Brazilian judiciary is “strong” – and, in his opinion, the strongest in the galaxy.
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It’s been a long time since “strong” stopped being an innocent adjective. In the political science tradition of “strong states” and “weak states,” the Cold War United States was a model of the weak state, decentralized and based on a system of checks and balances. The most powerful state par excellence was the Soviet Union: a centralized, ambiguous, and authoritarian state.
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More recently, the same epithet has become an epithet for politicians like Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orban, and Recep Erdogan, who have saved the country due to their ostentatious masculinity, concentration of power and varying degrees of disdain for institutions — members of the “strongmen” class.
Like the communist state and its leaders with illiberal tendencies, the Brazilian judiciary is powerful. If not, the court’s dean and Moraes’ ally, Gilmar Mendes, will not feel comfortable using legislative privilege and unilateral decision-making that makes it difficult to remove STF ministers, among other measures, reducing the total number of people authorized to request the opening of the process to a single individual – that only person being the Prosecutor General of the Republic, now his friend and former partner Paulo Jeunet. The dean’s decision was so shocking that it sparked an unprecedented wave of protests, even waking the dead.
But if it was obscene, it was nothing new.
It was Moraes who opened the sting, and not with a single blow of a machete. When, in 2019, he began to preside over an open investigation ex officio — which created the strange figure of investigative minister, judge and potential victim — many people remained silent because the targets were despicable Bolsonaristas, and the investigation was “an extraordinary tool for the self-defense of democracy,” according to then-Minister Luis Roberto Barroso. When, in the same year, Moraes censored the websites of the magazines Crusoé and O Antagonista, due to the mention of his colleague Dias Toffoli by whistleblower Marcelo Odebrecht, few people protested because those affected were outlets identified with lavagatismo and antihate.
Similar disdain has been met with several other decisions by Moraes that have been described as “controversial”, such as search and seizure orders against businessmen for holding – private – conversations on WhatsApp; Mass arrests; Long preventive detentions; and disproportionate sentences given to the defendants on January 8. The list is long, and the justification for ignoring it has always been the same: it is necessary to defend democracy in the face of the Bolsonian threat. After the exceptional period, the special forces must exercise “restraint.”
Because the extraordinary period has passed, Bolsonaro and others are in prison, and the dean of the Supreme Court is defying the legislature in broad daylight in order to protect himself and his colleagues from the threat of impeachment – another “exception” that must be approved by the court’s plenary session on the 12th of this month.
– Wow, I’m shocked. There is a game in this place! – said Captain Renault, in the movie “Casablanca”, when he was simulating bewilderment upon “discovering” that gambling was taking place in the establishment he himself frequented. Yes, it is nothing new that something is wrong in this place, and this place is now “the most powerful judicial authority in the world,” according to Moraes. To feign surprise at this stage is hypocritical.