Justice Alexandre de Moraes, having appointed himself as the greatest public authority Brazil has ever had throughout its history, and witnessing the government’s powerbrokers bow their heads to his every command, has ventured into uncharted territory. He seems to either not know how, not want to, or is no longer able to return to the only position the law allows him to fulfill – that of a Supreme Court justice, whose sole duty is to ensure that the Constitution is upheld. Having strayed from his lawful role, he increasingly acts solely through force. This brings up the perennial issue: a ruler who relies on force today will need to drop a heavier hammer day after day indefinitely in order to hold their ground. Either he’ll keep escalating the severity of his commands, or he will end up commanding nothing at all. That’s the highway to the danger zone. Recent events in Brazilian politics show that those who get knocked down are automatically at risk of ending up in jail.
The situation with Alexandre de Moraes is further complicated by a factor seldom ed by scientists, analysts, and political commentators. He seems to be an unprecedented case in public life – a figure who believes that the most effective way to build a political career is by making enemies. Not only will he need to amass more and more power, but he will also have to keep all these enemies neutralized for life, attached to an ankle monitor, in a catch-all approach. He will need to ban an ever-increasing number of Brazilians from using social media. He will have to intimidate more and more people with Federal Police investigations into “anti-democratic acts.“ He will never be able to close his perpetual inquiry in defense of “democracy.“ He has committed himself to oppose the only thing that could clean, at least temporarily, his slate: the amnesty for crimes that not only haven’t been perpetrated but also have been punished by him with 17-year prison sentences.
Despite wielding all this power, the justice has failed to create a political base. He has no real allies in Congress or among parties; he only has a bunch of rabbits scared of him, which is not the same thing. He certainly maintains a sort of death grip with Lula, the Workers’ Party (PT), and the underworld scums that both, but this neither does nor will tend to/address the needs of Brazilians, especially not in the future. Lula has convinced himself that Alexandre de Moraes will solve all his problems, starting with the most fatal – the lack of people’s and votes. The president has no plan B; it’s either Moraes or no one else. In fact, Lula and his system have outsourced their mission of guaranteeing their stay in government to the justice. To give you just an idea of the mess they’ve gotten themselves into, the most common phrase heard among the Brazilian left nowadays is: “Call Xandão [Moraes’s nickname].“ They utter this with the same excitement of someone saying “Go, Corinthians!” or “Free Palestine!” and get even more thrilled when they call for “The Federal [Police].“
This is yet another sign of the moral abyss into which the Brazilian left has decided to dive headfirst since the shock of losing the 2018 elections. But it’s not clear how this new devotion helps justice Moraes himself. Having the magical of the left, including Lula’s, doesn’t do much for him in today’s Brazil; when the president is no longer around, all this will be worthless. Would you feel safe if you were Alexandre de Moraes and had to rely on the backing of congresspeople like Lindbergh Farias (a.k.a. “Lindinho”), André Janones, and the like to stay on top? Without Lula, this is what real life has in stock for him; there’s no use looking for better options as there are none. The justice is the president’s life , which, for starters, guarantees that he will never be held legally able for whatever he does. But who could be Moraes’s life after all? The journalists from Globo News? Not even he would rely on that.
As it can be seen, the practical result of this extreme situation is that the justice has had to keep upping the ante, not to double his winnings but to hold onto the chips he still has. Climbing to a higher position in government is unlikely for him – not even Moraes himself believes he could become, for example, President of the Republic; he wouldn’t be elected to preside over the Pinheiros Club, where he’s a member. He cannot declare himself, or be appointed as, Lord Protector of Brazil, or Chief for Life of the Moderating Power, or Czar of the Global South since none of these positions exist. What’s feasible for him is to continue where he is, doing as he pleases, until 2043 – 19 years from now, when he’ll turn 75 his retirement will be mandatory. To achieve this, Brazil must remain as it is today, as immobile and immutable as a pharaoh’s mummy, surrounded by characters such as Lula, Arthur Lira, and Rodrigo Pacheco. This scenario gets even worse if you’re the most hated public man in Brazil.
A clue that might be useful to fathom where this path leads is the most recent achievement in Alexandre de Moraes’s general work – his own ission of having kept a homeless man from Brasília in prison for over 11 months for the crime of “coup d’état.” Think for 30 seconds about something like this: how is it possible, in any minimally rational justice system on the planet, to accuse a homeless person of “violent abolition of the Democratic State of Law”? Not even in the courts of Uganda’s former president Idi Amin has something similar been heard of. It’s the bottom of the barrel, both for Moraes and for the Supreme Court, in of humiliation. What would the civilized world think if it knew that Brazil has a magistrate and a “Supreme Court” that operate like this? The problem is: the nation’s highest court of justice has condemned itself to operate in a system driven by a series of intertwined delusions – hallucination leading to another.
The delusion of the “homeless coup plotter“ is just the direct and inevitable result of the delusion of the “slingshot coup,“ which followed the delusion of “anti-democratic acts,“ which followed the delusion of the court that gave itself permission to disregard any law in force in Brazil, and so on. Left-wing activists, intellectuals, and other groups detached from the economic production system have been building for years the fiction that this “Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory” manufactures democracy. It’s obvious that it only manages to produce the series of aberrations that we can see nowadays. Alexandre de Moraes is not just the cause of this, alongside the majority of his Supreme Court colleagues – for the benefit of Lula and with his full complicity – he is also the aftermath. He has reached a point now where he cannot anything but continue acting the way he’s been doing so far. He will have to attach today’s mistake to a bigger mistake tomorrow, and to an even bigger one afterward – until such option is no longer possible.
It’s a matter of facing the facts. Moraes’s next act after the “homeless man coup” is the invention of an “Integrated Center for Combating Disinformation and Defending Democracy” (CIEDDE) – just like that, with one “D” missing in the acronym soup – to be led by no less than the justice himself. Why would a country that claims to be the most advanced democracy in the world need another public agency to defend its “democratic” regime? Isn’t it enough to have an electoral police force that prohibits the most popular politician in Brazil from running for office until 2030 or that impeaches congresspeople in order to fulfill a personal vendetta of the President of the Republic? It isn’t: justice Moraes thinks the Superior Electoral Court (TSE) backing is not enough. Such court forbids saying that Lula s the dictator of Venezuela. It operates the electronic ballot boxes, which cannot be subject to any errors. It counts the votes. Yet, the justice wanted – and got – a second police force to patrol the elections.
Besides “combating,” the CIEDDE acronym could also bear expressions like “tactical-mobile,” “surveillance,” and others of the same kind. Why not just call it the “Nicolás Maduro Center for Electoral Fairness Defense” at once? But what they want, as in all the monstrosities that keep piling up one on top of the other, is clear to everyone: to force the Brazilian voter to vote only for the candidates that the TSE-CIEDDE complex considers “right.“ This, like so many other things, may end up being useless – but the problem with it, more than anything, dwells in the moral disqualification of the attempt. Justice Moraes wants to “combat,” he says, “disinformation.” But to do so he must define what “disinformation” is. No one can be forced to do or not to do anything that is not written in the law – and there is no law that defines what “disinformation” is. So, what now? Once again, it’s Alexandre de Moraes who will be in charge. That’s force being used once again since he believes there’s no other option.
A pronuncia em inglês esta horrivel