05/11/2023 – 7:37
Minister Alexandre de Moraes, president of the Superior Electoral Court (TSE), was the last to vote this Tuesday, 31, in the trial that condemned former president Jair Bolsonaro and general Walter Braga Netto to ineligibility for abuse of political power and economic and prohibited conduct in the celebrations of September 7, 2022.
Moraes presented a long and energetic vote. The blunt style, characteristic of the minister, resulted in a series of tirades in the final stretch of the trial. “Campaign, campaign and more campaign”, he stated when defending that Bolsonaro used the official celebrations of the Bicentenary of Independence to promote his candidacy for re-election. “The bicentenary served to talk about everything from gasoline prices to the launch of Pix, Fies and the increase in Auxílio Brasil. If this is not a campaign, nothing is a campaign.”
On the front line of the siege against the former president and the January 8 coup plotters, Moraes appears to be a light and loose minister, even relaxed. Instead of reading the written vote, he spoke freely this Tuesday, comfortable at the microphone. The notes only served to refresh your memory on key points of the presentation. The result was spontaneous and, at many times, acidic speech.
Moraes ironized, for example, the proximity between the civic-military parade on the Esplanada dos Ministérios, in Brasília, and the electric trio where Bolsonaro held a rally after the event. The former president walked from the official ceremony to the campaign event. “It is almost an insult to intelligence if the platform is only 300 meters away. There was no need to disguise it. The distance just wasn’t shorter, because it wasn’t possible”, reacted the minister.
The president of the TSE also refuted Bolsonaro’s defense. One of the former president’s lawyer’s arguments is that, to mark the separation between official and campaign events, he took off the presidential sash. “They just forgot, when taking off the banner, to press a button to disappear all the public money that was being spent on the Armed Forces, regrettably, at that moment, and wrongly, adulating a candidate for their own re-election”, he said.
In another part of the vote, Moraes recalled that the September 7th celebrations in Rio, traditionally organized on Avenida Presidente Vargas, in the city center, were moved to the Copacabana waterfront, a stronghold of Bolsonarist demonstrations, at the request of the former president. “There was no reasonable justification for canceling the parade. It was canceled because the president wanted to do it in Copacabana and that was it,” he said.
The minister also recalled that former deputy Daniel Silveira (PTB-RJ), convicted of anti-democratic demonstrations and arrested for successive violations of the electronic ankle bracelet, took to the stage in Rio. “Someone who was disrespecting the order of Justice, had broken the electronic ankle bracelet, deliberately, participating in this mix between the civic-military and the electoral sphere”, he criticized.
Moraes also reacted to excerpts from Bolsonaro’s speeches to supporters on September 7th. At the time, the former president stated that his government had revived “patriotism” in Brazil. “We were celebrating 200 years of independence, not someone’s coming to power,” replied Moraes.
The president of the TSE finally mocked the popular speech among the former president’s supporters about the advancement of communism. “This trauma, against communism, socialism, will one day be explained by historians in Brazil.”
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