“Vai, Xandão” in Planalto seals alliance between STF and Lula government in 2023

The festive reception for Minister Alexandre de Moraes at Palácio do Planalto, last Monday (11), to participate in the launch of a federal government program for homeless people, summarizes the informal alliance built, since last year, between the Supreme Court Federal (STF) and President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT). Throughout this first year in office, the Court not only did not get in the way, but also gave strength to the PT member in the political arena and in government.

The program launched by Lula is the result of an order from Moraes for federal, state and municipal governments to welcome the homeless population with social actions and which prohibits forced removal of these people and their belongings from squares, viaducts and sidewalks.

Other than that, Moraes’ performance in the investigations against the right generates immediate political gains for PTism. Each attempt by the minister to harass former president Jair Bolsonaro (PL) and his supporters in the various investigations he conducts, with an iron fist, is celebrated by government ministers and PT politicians. They like to announce that, sooner or later, the minister will order the arrest of Lula’s biggest rival.

Moraes doesn’t seem to be bothered by this crowd. When occupying the pulpit to speak at the event about the homeless, Moraes smiled in the direction of Lula and the first lady, Janja, when the PT militants shouted “Go, Xandão” and “no amnesty, no amnesty”, in an appeal for that Bolsonaro and his political group be punished.

At a PT election event over the weekend, Janja said that, “if everything goes well”, Bolsonaro will be arrested. On Tuesday, the day after the hacking of her account on the social platform about “digital militias”, which target supporters of the former president.

Social networks, moreover, were and continue to be the focus of the same concern of the government and the STF. The perception of members of both Powers is that this is a territory dominated by the new right, which abhors Lula as much as most of the Court’s ministers. Hence the joint commitment to try to “regulate” the sector, monitoring more rigorously what passes through the platforms, under the pretext of combating “hate speech” and “anti-democratic” content.

All of this adds up to the heavy hand of Moraes and the STF on Bolsonaro’s supporters on the 8th of January, always called “coup supporters” by the minister and the PT members, because of the invasion and depredation of the headquarters of the Three Powers, in an act of revolt. against Lula’s presidential inauguration, a week earlier. The first 25 defendants already convicted received sentences ranging from 14 to 17 years in prison. Dozens more must suffer the same fate.

Acts of STF ministers in favor of the Lula government

But it is not just Moraes who reached out to the Lula government. Even before the start of his term, minister Gilmar Mendes allowed, in a monocratic decision, the new administration to disburse, outside the spending ceiling, the R$ 168.7 billion set aside this year for the Bolsa Família program, Lula’s biggest electoral showcase. . The budget space was not enough for the Executive to produce a primary surplus (revenue minus expenses, excluding interest), the main metric for balancing public accounts and crucial for the health of the economy.

In November, minister Cristiano Zanin, Lula’s former lawyer and placed by him at the Court, avoided a greater evil: he requested a review and suspended a judgment that could force the government to correct FGTS balances by savings, an index higher than the current Reference Rate . In the government’s most optimistic projections, the bill would exceed R$8.6 billion over the next four years.

In March, the STF gave a great gift to the governability of Lula 3. In a monocratic decision, Ricardo Lewandowski, the most faithful of the ministers appointed by Lula, allowed the appointment of professional politicians to management positions in state-owned companies. This had been prohibited since 2017, when Congress itself approved a law to stop the damage that public companies suffered, under the PT administration, at the hands of unqualified people.

Lewandowski’s injunction, suspending this section of the State Law, allowed the government to resume the old practice of politically allocating them. This guaranteed, for example, that Aloizio Mercadante, a historic member of the PT, would take over the BNDES, and that the PT senator Jean Paul Prates would preside over Petrobras. Centrão chiefs, eager for positions in the public sector, liked the decision, which to this day has not been judged in depth and definitively by the STF.

Now retired, Lewandowski is Lula’s favorite to replace Flávio Dino, appointed to the STF, at the Ministry of Justice. The mission is the same: fight Bolsonaro and his allies, keep the Federal Police in control and preserve the government’s good relationship with the STF.

In the field of combating corruption, the Court deepened the dismantling of Lava Jato and the biggest beneficiary of this was Lula himself. After annulling convictions and investigations, the focus is now on retaliating against former judge Sergio Moro and former prosecutor Deltan Dallagnol, protagonists of the operation, while the court is urged to rescue companies that confessed to acts of corruption. J&F asked the Court for a discount on the R$10.3 billion fine it committed to paying in the leniency agreement. Odebrecht tries to maintain benefits granted to executives even after Dias Toffoli’s decision that annulled evidence handed over to the Federal Public Ministry.

In this monocratic decision, in September, the minister, who arrived at the STF thanks to Lula, but came to be disliked by him for failing to stop Lava Jato at its height, tried to redeem himself. He wrote that the arrest of the PT member, which took place in 2018, when he presided over the STF, was “one of the biggest judicial errors in the country’s history” and that the operation practiced “psychological torture, a 21st century trick, to obtain ‘evidence’ ‘ against innocent people.”

Gilmar Mendes, the dean and most influential minister of the Court, also began to praise Lula, in the opposite direction to his speech a few years ago, when he said that the PT had installed a “kleptocracy” in the country, due to the petrolão and oil schemes. monthly allowance. Now he says that Lula is a “statesman” and that, thanks to the STF, he returned to the Presidency of the Republic.

In the ideological field, the STF also played together with Planalto

This year, under the direction of Rosa Weber, the Court advanced three agendas dear to progressivism. In August and September, before retiring, she led trials on drugs, abortion and indigenous lands.

As a result, there is now just one vote left for the Court to decriminalize the possession of marijuana for personal consumption – this did not happen because André Mendonça, who tends to vote against it, asked for a review and postponed the decision. In the case of abortion, Rosa Weber opened the trial by voting to free the mother or doctors who end the life of the fetus until the third month of pregnancy from any punishment. The activists of the indigenous cause, in turn, won with the end of the trial that overturned the time frame, which limited the demarcation of lands occupied by tribes.

Despite all the efforts to get closer to Lula, the STF today finds itself cornered. The years of judicial and political activism, especially to oppose Bolsonaro, have damaged the court’s image among the population and angered a significant part of Congress, which has become more conservative and powerful in recent years. In November, the Senate approved a proposed amendment to the Constitution to end monocratic decisions by ministers.

The reaction came the following day: Gilmar Mendes and the current president of the Supreme Court, Luís Roberto Barroso, protested in the plenary. “It takes pride to reject this type of threat in a very clear way. This House is not made up of cowards. This House is not made up of fearful people. This Federal Supreme Court does not tolerate intimidation”, declared Gilmar Mendes.

He and other ministers were outraged by the vote in favor of the PEC by the government leader in the Senate, Jaques Wagner, and demanded a response from Planalto. In the same week, Lula received Gilmar Mendes and Alexandre de Moraes for a conversation. It was agreed that the president would accept the name they wanted for the head of the Attorney General’s Office (PGR) and for Rosa Weber’s position in the STF. With the appointment of Paulo Gonet and Flávio Dino to their respective positions, the bad atmosphere soon disappeared and “harmony” between the powers returned to force.