TSE walks to condemn Bolsonaro for abuse of office – 06/29/2023 – Politics

The TSE (Superior Electoral Court) is moving towards making Jair Bolsonaro (PL) ineligible, for a period of eight years, for using his position as president to promote a presentation to ambassadors with a focus on delegitimizing the elections.

Of the 4 ministers who voted until this Thursday (29) in the judgment, 3 considered that the former president sought to benefit electorally from the event, attacking the bases of democracy, such as confidence in the electoral process.

The only dissenting vote, by Minister Raul Araújo, was in the sense that, despite the electoral connotation of the meeting, it would not be serious enough, one of the necessary aspects to configure the electoral offenses of which Bolsonaro is accused.

At the meeting, the then president repeated lies about the electoral process and sought to discredit TSE ministers. In addition to being broadcast on TV Brasil, the event held at the Palácio da Alvorada was publicized on Bolsonaro’s social networks.

There are still 3 other members of the court to speak. The session will resume this Friday (30), from 12 pm.

For Luiz Carlos dos Santos Gonçalves, former regional electoral attorney in São Paulo, an interesting aspect of the action under trial is that it revolves around an incontrovertible fact, in this case the meeting with ambassadors.

“The divergence is how to assess the seriousness of this fact”, he says. “The law requires seriousness, but it does not bring a metric for its consideration. What we have are contributions from doctrine and jurisprudence, but that do not remove the space of evaluation of each minister.”

In their votes, ministers discussed the seriousness under two aspects, the qualitative, which refers to the disapproval of the conduct, and the quantitative, which deals with the scope and repercussions on the election.

For Minister Raul, the only one to vote for Bolsonaro’s non-conviction, there was no seriousness in the former president’s conduct.

The minister argues that, although one cannot deny the “context of instability arising from speeches with untrue content” –of which the speech of the then president would be a significant example–, this would not have affected the conduct of the election by the Electoral Justice.

He also considered the low abstention in the second round of the election as a demonstration that the speeches against the electoral system would not have had major consequences. In the quantitative aspect, he argues that the fact that Bolsonaro’s speech at the meeting with ambassadors was similar to that of previous occasions would reduce his ability to “produce a strong and surprising impact and harmful results”.

Minister Floriano de Azevedo Marques, in turn, considered that Bolsonaro’s speech to the ambassadors has qualitative gravity because it produces an “antagonistic effect with the function of the head of state”.

“What could be more serious in the actions of a head of state who, aiming at electoral objectives, mobilizes the apparatus of the Republic to pass internationally the idea that Brazilian elections are not clean?”, he questioned.

For him, the quantitative aspect of gravity was also configured, since the meeting was broadcast using the public network, with cuts broadcast on social networks that would be “reproduced in geometric progression among the supporters of the ticket”.

Electoral lawyer Carla Nicolini, a member of Abradep (Brazilian Academy of Electoral and Political Law), says that the minister’s argument has legal weight because it conveys the seriousness of the content of Bolsonaro’s speech to the ambassadors.

Minister André Ramos Tavares also highlighted, in his vote, that the fact that the speech to the ambassadors was led by the head of the country’s Executive would prove the seriousness of the speeches brought in the action. It would be stamped on the use of the public structure to make an anti-institutional discourse with electoral purposes.

On the other hand, a difference between the votes of ministers who decided for ineligibility is the dimension given to elements outside the meeting in July of last year.

Floriano, for example, focused his decision on the event alone. For him, the coup draft included in the action and other Bolsonaro lives or interviews serve only marginally to illustrate conduct. He refers to these elements as “peripheral, expendable, even irrelevant” and does not explore them.

Minister Tavares, on the other hand, presented in his vote more points of contact with the arguments of the rapporteur of the action, the general electoral inspector Benedito Gonçalves.

In his vote, Benedito cites camps in front of barracks and the 8th of January and argues that the “banalization of the coup d’état” is a serious consequence of unfounded attacks on the electoral voting system, adding that, in addition to organizing the event, Bolsonaro is responsible for the “pragmatic effects” of the content of the broadcast message.

In addition to the disagreement on the seriousness of the conduct, Minister Raul also had a different position on the inclusion of the coup draft found by the Federal Police in the house of former Minister Anderson Torres among the evidence.

In his vote, he said he saw no connection between the object of the process and the document, arguing that he previously voted, in February, in favor of including it in the file so that this relationship could be investigated, which would not have been demonstrated.

Floriano, in turn, despite not using it in his vote, rejected the defense’s argument that the draft would be an expansion of the object of the action presented by the PDT, in August of last year.

Benedito also refutes that there has been an extension of the initial petition, a question that is part of Bolsonaro’s defense strategy. For him, the other situations only contextualize the episode.