Being a minister means exercising a public function, not flaunting a lifestyle. The position allows for a private life with the privilege and comfort of the top of the Brazilian social pyramid. It just doesn’t allow extractive luxury, oligarchic and gangsterist processions, family entrepreneurship.
The career of a minister comes with a lot of power, prerogative and prestige, all it requires is not attacking the institution. And it doesn’t pay enough to dress in gold. Not out of moralism. Not only for ethical or aesthetic reasons, but for legal reasons compatible with Brazilian socioeconomic reality.
What are ethics, aesthetics and legality for those who enjoy a whiskey and cigar tasting sponsored by a banker? At the “Brazilian Ideas Legal Forum”, in 2024, the person who came up with the big idea was, the king of the bank fraud box. Why not finance a night of alcohol and smoke with public authorities for US$640,000?
We were accustomed to hearing jokes about magistocratic vulgarity. And we become morally anesthetized, legally lazy, politically paralyzed. The practice deepened, and many became richer in the patrimonialist conjunction. He just looked.
This month, the institution came closer to the precipice following the news of the relationship between STF ministers and Carminha da Faria Lima, the author of the predictable financial scandal. Not because promiscuity was new, not because conflicts of interest have not existed among ministers for many years. But because it was well designed what indifference to conflicts of interest can lead to. It became a Porta dos Fundos sketch.
In circumstances like these, what does the friend of the court do? Friend in the genuine sense of the word, made up of care, frankness and critical freedom: he points out the error, asks for composure, proposes a debate on the code of ethics, defends institutional solutions for individual accountability that preserve trust in justice and the institutionality of the STF.
And what does a minister’s sycophant do? He denies any irregularity, defends the pharaonic fee paid by the banker for unknown and uncomplex legal work. He accuses the journalist who reports facts of being a launderer and classifies anyone who criticizes the STF’s decision as an “enemy of the court”.
The friend of the court is worried about what legitimacy will be left for the STF to defend the Constitution from lurking enemies. The success of Bolsonarist extremism depends on the implosion of the constitutional obstacle and the mastery of constitutionality.
The minister’s sycophant prefers to let the court bleed, bury dirt in a shallow grave and find himself in Lisbon as if nothing. You finance alcohol and smoke so that the flow of fees from this profitable sycophancy pact does not stop.
The friend of the court is not paid. It recognizes that the damage self-inflicted by a minister to his authority is irreversible and contaminates the justice system. He understands that all that remains for the institution of justice is to reduce damages, some quick solution. What has been proven is serious enough.
The friend of the court is not naive enough to expect voluntary public spirit at a time like this. But you try to figure out some way to stop the bleeding. Whether by retirement or legal sanction. Anything other than flattery.
A sycophant minister is not a friend of the court. Neither.
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