When the President Admits He Cannot Govern Without the Judges
By Hotspotnews
In July 2025, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva said the quiet part out loud. Facing yet another defeat in Congress over his IOF tax decree, he declared: “If I don’t go to the Supreme Court, I no longer govern the country. Each monkey in its own tree. Congress legislates, I govern.”
Those words should have triggered a national alarm. Instead, they were treated as just another Tuesday in Brasília. The Workers’ Party and its allies have long treated the Supreme Federal Court as an auxiliary arm of the Planalto. Lula’s confession merely confirmed what conservatives have warned for years: under this government, the elected executive cannot function without the unelected judiciary.
Brazil did not arrive at this abnormal arrangement by accident. After the 1988 Constitution expanded judicial power to protect democracy from another dictatorship, successive crises—Lava Jato, the Bolsonaro years, and the January 8, 2023 events—allowed the Court, and especially Justice Alexandre de Moraes, to concentrate authority that properly belongs to the other branches. What began as institutional self-defense hardened into routine political management. Monocratic decisions, broad content restrictions, investigations without clear limits, and the repeated suspension or rewriting of congressional acts became tools of governance.
Lula’s third term exposed the structural weakness. With a fragmented Congress dominated by pragmatic centrists and a strengthened right, the PT lacks the votes to pass its agenda the democratic way. So the government goes to the STF. Tax policy, spending measures, regulatory decrees—when Congress says no, the Court is asked to say yes. The arrangement works because interests converge. Moraes and like-minded justices keep the Bolsonarist opposition under continuous legal pressure; the government gains a reliable veto player against the legislature. The people, whose votes are supposed to decide who rules, become spectators.
This is not separation of powers. It is a substitution of powers. An unelected minister with lifetime tenure and expansive investigative authority effectively decides what the elected president may or may not do. Free speech suffers when platforms are ordered to silence critics. Due process suffers when the same office investigates, charges, and judges. Legislative legitimacy suffers when laws carefully debated and passed are quietly neutralized by a single justice’s injunction.
How long can a country survive like this?
Not indefinitely. Democracies rest on consent and clear lines of accountability. When citizens see that the real decisions are made by a small group of magistrates rather than by the representatives they elected, trust collapses. When one side of the political spectrum is permanently treated as a security threat while the other enjoys judicial protection, polarization deepens rather than heals. When the president himself admits he needs the Court to govern, the message to the public is unmistakable: elections are no longer sufficient.
History shows that hybrid regimes—where formal democratic institutions coexist with concentrated, unaccountable power—rarely remain stable. They either restore genuine checks and balances or slide further into institutional capture. Brazil still has a vigorous opposition, a free (if embattled) press, and millions of citizens who refuse to accept that a minister’s signature outweighs sixty million votes. Those forces remain the country’s best hope.
The path forward is clear and conservative in the best sense of the word: restore the proper roles of each branch. Congress must legislate and defend its prerogatives. The executive must govern through persuasion and coalition-building, not judicial shortcuts. The judiciary must return to judging cases under law rather than managing politics. Fixed terms for Supreme Court justices, stricter limits on monocratic power, and real transparency in investigations would be prudent first steps.
Lula’s own words revealed the truth. A government that cannot function without the constant intervention of the Supreme Court is not governing—it is being propped up. A republic that tolerates this arrangement for too long will eventually discover that the props have become the walls, and the walls no longer protect the people. Brazil deserves better.