On Friday afternoon (Sept 4), at yet another ceremony in the Planalto Palace, the seat of Brazil's government in Brasília, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva leaned into the microphone and talked about a disorderly household. "When the children inside the house are in disarray, it is up to whoever runs the house to solve it," he said, pressing Supreme Court Chief Justice Edson Fachin and Prosecutor General Paulo Gonet to find a way out of a crisis that has shaken the court since Justice André Mendonça ordered the unsealing of a Federal Police report that names his colleague Alexandre de Moraes as an interlocutor of former banker Daniel Vorcaro, arrested over fraud at Banco Master.
The campaign playbook
Behind the scenes of his reelection bid, that speech has become a script. According to Folha de S.Paulo, Lula's campaign team plans to give prominence to the judicial reform proposal the president floated on Friday and tie it to a package: curbs on spending by judges and prosecutors, anticorruption measures, and a debate on the ties between magistrates and businesspeople. The newspaper reports the strategy was stitched together with campaign coordinator Edinho Silva and ministers Sidônio Palmeira (Communications) and Jorge Messias (Attorney General's Office), centered on criticizing promiscuous relations between judges and businesspeople and on defending a code of ethics for the judiciary.
The stated goal is to take the lead of the debate over changes to the courts before the war among the Supreme Court's justices contaminates the October election. The math is political. As SBT News reported, the campaign fears that the erosion of Moraes will reach Lula in a tight race in which Flávio Bolsonaro of the PL party, son of the imprisoned former president Jair Bolsonaro, is rising in the polls. Surveys cited by the column show that many voters see the president and the justice as allies, an impression fed by Moraes's role in the truce that unlocked the government's agenda in Congress with Senate President Davi Alcolumbre, and by his work as rapporteur in the coup plot trial that ended with Jair Bolsonaro's conviction and imprisonment.
The groundwork began before Lula raised his tone. On Wednesday (Sept 2), PT president Edinho Silva released a video with the line the campaign would adopt: "No one is above the law, whether an ordinary citizen, a government official, a member of parliament or even a member of the judiciary." According to SBT News, the team is preparing ads for social media and for free electoral TV time, narrated off camera and without Lula on screen, to test voter reaction before taking the subject to the broadcast. Allies such as Fernando Haddad, running for governor of São Paulo, and Gleisi Hoffmann, running for the Senate in Paraná, have already spoken up for the investigations.
2027 on the horizon
The president, for his part, set the clock. On Friday, according to CNN Brasil, he defended holding the debate on judicial reform in 2027 and complained again about "selective leaks" in police investigations. "If we do not put a stop to this, we will lose the credibility we want society to have in the justice system," he said, referring to what he called an industry of fake news and leaks driven by political and economic interests.
Back to the opening scene: at the Planalto ceremony, Lula told Fachin that the Supreme Court and the Prosecutor General's Office "are under great expectation from Brazilian society." In the metaphor he chose, the disorderly house was the judiciary. In the ads the campaign is now testing online, putting the house in order has become a campaign theme.