In the dictatorship, the fate of losers is jail or death. In democracy, it is the future opportunity to return to the government. The main virtue of the democratic system lies in this: competition between political elites excludes the use of violence, protecting society from the spectrum of civil war. Hence public freedoms, the independence of the judiciary and the subordination of armed bodies to civil power. It is in the light of such concepts that Bolsonaro and his minions, accused of the crime of plotting a coup d’état.
Never, since redemocratization, the Supreme Court has faced such a relevant criminal action. Defendants know they weighs against them a rock of unavoidable evidence. It remains to appeal to the classic shortcut of showing off as victims of political persecution. The strategy rests on the judicial deviations of an STF that prefers easy popularity to the rigors of due process of law.
The supreme judges, who rather bowed to Sergio Moro’s wills, gave Alexandre de Moraes the role of sheriff general of democracy. In his past incarnation, from SP Secretary of SP, Moraes was bound of “fascist” on the left. Since becoming a rapporteur of the polite survey on fake news and undemocratic acts, the left has transfigured yesterday’s “fascist” into the people’s hero. Its legal adventures offer the defendants the only chance to contest the predictable outcome of the criminal action.
Moraes is not a “natural judge”: he became a rapporteur for the arbitrary logic of the inquiry. Nor is it a legitimate judge: it is a potential victim of the planned initial act of the coup conjuration. When it rejects declaring its impediment, the Supreme Court provides involuntary favor to defendants.
It is not the only one. Driving into the demagogic notion of “exemplary justice,” the supreme judges condemned the useful idiots of the depredations in the federal capital to hyperbolic penalties of up to 17 years in prison. Today, in the face of the dilemma set by the trial of Bolsonaro et Caterva, they are discreetly beginning to urge exceptional formulas designed to reduce the sentences of those convicted.
There is more. Most of the smaller defendants of January 8 were sentenced by the STF full. Thanks, however, another circumstantial turnaround of the court, the coup plot’s leading core will be tried only by the first class. At the time of truth, the STF stumbles on the luminous plates with which it decorated its own route.
The defendants lost the inaugural political battle. The failure of Copacabana’s Bolsonarist demonstration attests that the streets no longer support them. But the shameful presence of Paulista Governor Tarcísio de Freitas illuminates a historical crossroads: the inability of the right to purge its scammers.
It is a crucial knot of Brazilian democracy. In the decade preceding the 1964 coup, right -wing leaders multiplied their visits to the barracks. The pockets unfolds this ancient thread of our republican tradition. The criminal action against Bolsonaro and his civic-military dressing up puts leaders such as Tarcisio, Zema, Caiado and Ratinho Júnior in the face of a polar alternative: the defendants or democracy? The answer to this question, even more so that the STF sentence will indicate the state of health of our democratic system.
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