Members of the PL (Liberal Party) see the minister’s inauguration Kassio Nunes Brands in the presidency of TSE (Superior Electoral Court)which takes place this Tuesday (12), with optimism, while members of the PT (Workers’ Party) fear a less proactive Court throughout this election year.
Nunes Marques will be ahead of the TSE during the October election. The vice-president will be André Mendonça. Both were nominated by Jair Bolsonaro to the STF (Supreme Federal Court) while President of the Republic. Therefore, allies of the former president see no room for possible criticism.
The expectation of PL members is that Nunes Marques will manage technically and “distanced” from emotions. The minister even attended his inauguration, including Jair Bolsonaro and Fernando Collor de Mello, who are under house arrest.
For party leaders, Nunes Marques will be impartial and act as an “arbiter”. “Nothing like what we saw in the last elections,” a painting criticizes Alexandre de Moraes, who became a target of the Bolsonarists especially for his role in the fake news investigation and convictions in the coup plot process.
PT members are already in contact with Nunes Marques, exchanging perceptions and presenting demands. According to reports to CNN, the minister has demonstrated “good will”. Still, there is a fear that he will be less active than Alexandre de Moraes was in 2022.
Moraes presided over the TSE during the 2022 elections, in a management that was characterized by speed and interventionism in combating disinformation. In one of the landmark moments, on the eve of the second round, the Court approved a resolution to allow the exclusion of false content to be extended ex officio to situations of “equivalence of content”.
In practice, it was not necessary for the Public Prosecutor’s Office or the injured party to request the exclusion of an insulting publication. The TSE itself could order the removal of identical content.
The PT members’ warning is that, without a proactive TSE, fake news could impact the direction of the election, given the speed of propagation of content on the internet and the sophistication of new mechanisms such as artificial intelligence – which, in fact, presents relevant evolution before 2022.
