Hoover Institution (Stanford, CA) — As his homeland exits a period of turmoil, rife with internet disinformation and a January 6-like storming of the legislature, Brazilian Federal Supreme Court President Justice Luís Roberto Barroso told a crowd at Hoover that aggression and uncivility in politics are to blame.
Thrust into the limelight when outgoing president Jair Bolsonaro suggested Brazil go back to a system of paper balloting ahead of the 2022 election, Barroso was then head of Brazil’s Superior Electoral Court. He said moving back to paper ballots would have opened Brazil’s world-renowned electoral system to fraud.
“I opposed it, and I was invited to Congress to explain why we should keep the electronic voting system rather than go back to paper ballot,” Barroso said.
“I reminded them that they were elected in that system and the risks of going back to the paper system—and (Congress was) convinced, and they voted against the change and (Bolsonaro) got very upset and insulted me in different ways that are unpublishable.”
It was one of several times Barroso, standing for the rule of law, got in the way of the former Brazilian president and forces seeking to undo Brazil’s democratic system.
Now the president of Brazil’s Federal Supreme Court, Barroso participated in a public question and answer session with Diego Werneck Arguelhes, senior researcher at the Brazilian Center for International Relations and associate professor at Insper São Paulo, at the Hoover Institution on September 23, 2024.
The discussion was made possible by the Hoover Institution’s History Lab, Stanford’s Constitutional Law Center, and the Stanford Center for Latin American Studies. Hoover History Lab Student Fellow Felipe Jafet spearheaded the initiative.
Barroso started out by reminding the Stanford community audience that the Federal Supreme Court of Brazil is structured very differently and has many more responsibilities than the US Supreme Court.
Its 11 justices heard or decided on 100,000 cases in 2023. In comparison, the US Supreme Court received 7,000 cases that year and decided to hear only 63 of them.
“Our constitution also addresses other matters that in other parts of the world are left to politics. It also deals with social security, tax, healthcare, education, environmental protections, indigenous rights, industrial policy, families, and protection of elderly,” Barroso said. “Matters that in other parts of the world would be deemed political, in Brazil these matters become a matter of constitutional jurisdiction.”
In addition, there are over 100 actors in Brazilian society, ranging from labor unions to the national bar association, to individual state governors, who are allowed to file “direct actions” and their matters are heard by the Federal Supreme Court.
It’s a heavy lift for Barroso, his 10 justice colleagues, and the veritable army of clerks and other support staff that work for them, but it’s what a majority of Brazilians voted for when a new constitution was ratified in 1988.
“It’s a huge workload and I think we should have better ways of screening things, but it’s not as bad as it sounds,” he said, adding that many decisions they render are simply automatic support of a lower court’s decision completed without any hearings or significant deliberation.
But after the events of January 8, 2023, when Brazil’s legislature, presidential palace, and federal supreme court buildings were stormed and vandalized, drawing eerie parallels to the storming of the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, in Washington DC, Barroso said his latest role has taken on new meaning.
Unlike January 6, 2021, Barroso said the events that occurred on January 8, 2023, in the country’s capital, Brasilia, felt very much like they could have widened into a full coup d’etat. Older Brazilians still have vivid memories of a military junta seizing power in 1964.
He said that on the day of the storming, Bolsonaro ordered his defense minister, Fernando Azevedo e Silva, to scramble Brazil’s most modern fighter jets to fly low and fast over the supreme court, in hopes their sonic booms would break the building’s windows as a means of intimidating the justices inside.
The minister refused.
“I don’t know how close we were to having a coup, but many people were engaged in a coup, of that I have no doubt,” Barroso said.
Since that time, the physical damage to the government buildings in Brasilia has been repaired, but some unease still lingers.
“I think the exceptional times are over,” Barroso said about national politics in Brazil. “I think the country is back to a sense of normality, in the sense that there are people who like the government, people that don’t like the government.”
But he said the question of what will happen to the people allegedly involved in the events of January 8 hangs over society.
More than 1,250 of those indicted for their roles on the January 8 insurrection were offered a plea bargain under which they would not be charged criminally as long as they agreed to stay off social media for two years, pay a fine equivalent to $1,000 USD, and take a course, essentially on civics, offered by Brazil’s attorney general.
Barroso said about 700 of the accused have refused the deal and instead are facing possible imprisonment. “While these cases go unresolved, it’s hard to completely quell the tension in Brazilian society,” he added.
But Barroso said the willingness to break government property, fight police, and act aggressively in the name of a chosen political cause is a new wound in societies worldwide, one that needs to end.
“The loss of civility. It’s the need to more aggressively do politics. This need to disqualify morally the people who think different than you think,” Barroso said. “(The idea that) if you have a different view than me, you’re serving a dishonest cause.”
