Former president Michel Temer said he advised Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes to seek dialogue with fellow Justice André Mendonça to contain the rift dividing Brazil's top court. The phone call took place on Monday (7), a national holiday, before Mendonça's ruling on Tuesday (8) that removed the leadership of the Federal Police. Temer said the ruling made a truce harder.
Temer, who governed Brazil from 2016 to 2018, appointed Moraes to the court, known as STF, in 2017. He confirmed the call to CNN Brasil and said he spoke "very quickly" with the justice. He said he had not spoken with Mendonça. "I did not speak with Mendonça. I spoke very quickly with Alexandre by phone. I said a bit that the ideal solution would be that, but it was simply that," he said.
A harder truce
On Tuesday, Mendonça provisionally removed Federal Police director-general Andrei Rodrigues and intelligence director Leandro Almada. "It got complicated. I recognize it got quite complicated. Until Sunday, for example, there was no such stricter decision. So I think it has now become a bit difficult," Temer said.
Interlocutors of the former president told Folha de S.Paulo that he told Moraes a way out would require some accommodation between the two justices. In Temer's assessment, the decision raises the conflict to a new level by drawing in the Federal Police command and, indirectly, the government of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
"The ideal would be for them to talk there, all of them, and reach an accommodation, because any litigious solution the Supreme Court may hand down will be terrible for the country."
The 2021 precedent
It is not the first time Temer has acted as a bridge in crises involving Moraes. In September 2021, at the height of the clash between then president Jair Bolsonaro and the justice, after Bolsonaro called Moraes a "scoundrel" at an Independence Day rally, Temer arranged a phone call between the two and helped draft the "Declaration to the Nation" in which Bolsonaro stepped back from the attacks. The truce was short-lived. In an op-ed published in the newspaper O Estado de S. Paulo, Folha reports, Temer wrote that both justices are highly capable jurists and that the court must preserve the country's unity and the stability of its institutions.
The crisis grew after Mendonça unsealed messages extracted from the phone of former banker Daniel Vorcaro that mention the businessman's relationship with Moraes. Chief Justice Edson Fachin gave the two justices five days to explain themselves. The full court's review of the Federal Police removals was suspended on Tuesday after Justice Gilmar Mendes requested a view, with a majority already formed to keep the officials removed, according to news outlet g1. Temer still hopes for a way out: "I still hope, as a guess, that they find a solution of internal harmony. It will look very bad for the Supreme Court and for the country," he said.