Zanin, just don’t fall into the siren song – 06/07/2023 – Conrado Hübner Mendes

Lula defined the choice of STF minister as “something so mine that I don’t want to share”. There was no better index of process degeneration. Degenerate naming produces degenerate cutting. And that might not end well.

The STF is moving towards less institutionality, more personality; less legality, more arbitrariness; less argument, more verbal illusionism; less impartiality, more promiscuity; less procedure, more chicanery; less jurisprudence, more populisprudence; less public, more private; less Constitution, more low politics. Downtown habitat.

Nominated Cristiano Zanin, it is now possible to take stock of the process. I list some pathologies.

Speculation about the “listed” started to make permanent smoke; journalism accepted the allegiance to the lobby of self-candidates, reverberates off-the-record statements, creates a fictitious “race”, and sees a “war behind the scenes”; and endeavored to legitimize Zanin in advance, collecting statements from personalities in support of him.

It has become acceptable for a retiring minister to fight for the nomination of a former advisor to succeed him; and immediately jump, the day after the farewell, to private law, without any quarantine.

The process is closed to names outside the magistocratic soirees, with a history in the defense of relevant public causes. The argument for women and blacks from outside the Rio-São Paulo axis, given the history of almost 100% white men from the Southeast, is rejected.

Diversity has been reduced to an aesthetic fetish, a moral mania, a capricious frivolity. It is ignored that it produces more legitimacy and intelligence; less mediocrity and single-mindedness. And that these virtues count.

It is ignored that the demand for diversity never gave up the appointment of someone with an independent career, willing to buy constitutional fights and take sides. With character traits and biography, therefore.

The legal world was reduced to a childlike division between car wash and anti-car wash. And it was not realized that, in this lawless fight, the hegemony conquered by the anti-wash-jet service has a lot of affinity with what was rightly criticized in the car wash.

Zanin has not yet been confirmed by the Senate, but the noise for Rosa Weber’s vacancy has begun. The magistocratic legal lobby sent word, and journalism echoed, that the choice is “complex”. Hence a woman “hardly to be named”.

There are some irreversible losses with this indication. But one can still ask that, despite everything, Zanin surprise the country. Let’s imagine four hypothetical Zanins.

The worst Zanin that the STF can have is the dean minister’s knick-knack, seduced by the magistocratic center, frequenting events in Lisbon, forced to join the constitutional positions of others. For insecurity and loneliness.

When Ulysses, in “Homer’s Odyssey”, was sailing home, a sorceress suggested tying himself to the mast so as not to fall into the sirens’ song and die. Zanin will need to resist the siren song. Other STF ministers did not resist.

Perhaps Zanin will become an altar boy minister, defender of morals and good customs in the colonial sense, not the constitutional one. If you accept Magno Malta as an interlocutor, what will be at stake is not the defense, but the repression of religious freedom.

Zanin could be an English lord judge, with an elitist bent, in tune with his former law clients, but in favor of basic emancipatory causes, such as the liberation of marijuana possession or women’s reproductive rights.

Why not dream of the best possible Zanin? Judge-courage, classic liberal, who sees the court as a shield against majority violence, a John Locke of the 21st century, cosmopolitan, attentive to the environment and the humanity of indigenous peoples. That understands constitutional rights as a condition for market competition to be in fact free, not fake, and for political competition to be in fact democratic, not fake.

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