The Hospital da Asa Norte, in Brasília, announced on Thursday, February 2, the death of a 58-year-old man born in Botucatu, in São Paulo, two days after being admitted to the emergency room with severe burns. He set himself on fire on the Esplanada dos Ministérios in protest against Alexandre de Moraes, Justice of the Supreme Federal Court (STF). According to witnesses, his last words were “death to Xandão”. “Xandão” is the biggest target of the Bolsonarists’ sometimes insane anger, more so than President Lula da Silva.
The furious movement against 54-year-old Moraes began on August 20, 2021, when Bolsonaro sent a 19-page request to the federal senate for the impeachment of the magistrate, who also presides over the Superior Electoral Court (TSE), for “extrapolating the limits of the Constitution”. Two weeks earlier, by decision of Moraes after consultation with the other members of the TSE, the then president was involved in the investigation into the disclosure of fake news by politicians, businessmen and influencers of the extreme right in Brazil. At stake are Bolsonaro’s attacks on electronic voting and the electoral system.
Shortly afterwards, during the celebration of Brazil’s independence on September 7, Bolsonaro made his anger public in a speech to thousands of acolytes on Avenida Paulista in São Paulo. “Any decision of Mr. Alexandre de Moraes will no longer comply with this president. The patience of our people has already run out. He still has time to ask for his cap and mind his own business,” he said, “Moraes from .” from the crowd.
“Why personify in Alexandre de Moraes? Because that personification makes it easier. The population does not know exactly what the STF means, although the court has become better known over the years. And giving a name, giving a face , facilitates the idea of this enemy,” warned then professor of constitutional law Rubens GReader of the Getúlio Vargas Foundation to BBC Brasil.
From that September 7 to the present day, Bolsonaro has set the tone in every speech against Moraes, whom he has classified as a “scoundrel”, “boy”, “scoundrel”, “bum” and “dictator”. So far that Lula, the electoral rival and favorite target of the Brazilian right for decades, has taken a back seat to the list of enemies of Bolsonarianism.
In the camp in front of the army headquarters in Brasilia, where the January 8 attacks began, there were more posters with slogans insulting Moraes than Lula, as confirmed by the DN report, on the eve of the inauguration of the new president . In the attacks, the headquarters of the STF, where the judge is active, was more destroyed than the Palácio do Planalto, where the politician works.
In addition to the Bolsonarist who burned himself in protest against “Xandão”, the judge was in the news twice in the past week alone as a target from the right: Senator Marcos do Val reported that former deputy Daniel Silveira, one of the main targets in the research of fake news of 2021, and Bolsonaro himself urged him to include Moraes without his knowledge. The purpose, according to Val, was to try to produce evidence against him, as president of the TSE, declare martial law, prevent Lula from assuming the presidency and stage a coup.
Walter Delgatti, de hacker at the origin of Vaza Jato, a series of reports that exposed the irregularities of Operation Lava Jato, he told the Brazilian newspaper in English The Brazilian report who today works for Carla Zambelli, another Bolsonarist, like Silveira, in the center of the fake newsand that one of his jobs would be to clone Moraes’ cell phone.
If the right loathes the “Emperor Cabeça de Ovo”, as the right is also called by Bolsonaristas on social networks in an allusion to power and baldness, the left has become accustomed to applauding him.
In this regard, Moraes was the pretext of an online debate between Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who, along with Edward Snowden, revealed the scandal at the NSA in the US and published Vaza Jato in Brazil, and Celso Rocha de Barros, writer and sociologist, both connected with left. Greenwald accused Moraes of excesses and compared him to Sergio Moro, the current senator who acted in part as a judge against Lula. Barros praised the magistrate’s role in defending institutions at a sensitive time when they came under attack from a president, Bolsonaro, with a coup project.
“There are people who fluctuate between applause and acknowledging that without a defender [defesa central] who does not run away from the divided things would have ended very badly, and the failure, because the back [defesa-central, também] kicks the shin and goes about it like he’s playing in the floodplain, not in a tournament governed by rules, ceremonies and liturgies,” academic Wilson Gomes summarized in a newspaper article Folha de S. Paulo.
But the applause from the left today contrasts with the reaction of the same political field to his appointment to the STF in 2017, by Michel Temer, following the death of judge Teori Zavascki, in a plane crash. Justice minister in the government of Dilma Rousseff’s successor, the judge was called “unprepared and partisan” in an official note from the PT, where his appointment was classified as “profound disrespect for the country’s legal conscience”.
Today, the same judge who leads Bolsonarists to burn their own bodies is reproduced by Lula supporters in memes on social networks with the cover of Superman and the epithet “Super Xandão”.
Source: DN
