The Demoralization of Moraes: What Is Left?
By Hotspotnews
Alexandre de Moraes has spent years as the most powerful and polarizing figure on Brazil’s Supreme Federal Court. He controlled the long-running fake-news inquiry opened in 2019, ordered platform takedowns, authorized electronic monitoring, and pursued cases tied to the political opposition. To his defenders, these steps protected institutions from threats. To his critics, they concentrated investigative, prosecutorial, and judicial functions in one office in ways that strained basic separations of power.
That concentration is now visibly fraying. Edson Fachin, the Court’s president, has archived the fake-news inquiry. Reports and the Court’s own records describe documents that moved almost exclusively through Moraes’s cabinet for years: papers received and stamped by his staff, stored on his shelves, and used for intimations outside ordinary channels. When the relatoria changed, aides had to cart physical volumes out of the office so the process could be normalized and digitized. Fachin’s decision also followed Moraes’s attempt to deploy the same inquiry against a colleague after a Federal Police report surfaced messages and contacts involving banker Daniel Vorcaro and Moraes’s family circle. Internal discomfort, already present among some justices who viewed the arrangement as a parallel structure, became decisive.
Journalist Augusto Nunes captured the mood in a recent television segment: Moraes is “on the way to the end,” he said, calling him corrupt, deficient in legal knowledge, and destined for removal either by fellow ministers or by the Senate. Nunes has made similar accusations for years. What has changed is the institutional evidence now surrounding them. Dozens of impeachment petitions sit in the Senate. Public polling has shown substantial support for removal. Moraes’s once-dominant role in high-profile investigations has been curtailed by the very Court he helped shape.
What remains is still substantial. A single justice retains lifetime tenure, the ability to issue monocratic decisions, and residual influence over cases already under way. The Senate has not advanced any impeachment to a vote requiring a two-thirds majority. The Court as a body has not formally repudiated the broader body of work produced under the inquiry. Lula’s government, which once benefited from the containment of Bolsonaro-aligned actors, now faces its own awkwardness: a justice whose tactics have become a political liability even among those who once welcomed them.
The deeper question is institutional. When one minister’s office can function for years as both investigator and adjudicator, with limited external oversight, the damage is not limited to one person. It erodes public confidence that the highest court applies the same rules to everyone. The archiving of the inquiry and the documentation of its irregular processing are concrete steps toward restoring ordinary procedure. They do not, by themselves, restore the reputation of the justice most identified with the exception.
What is left, then, is a narrowed but still potent authority inside a Court that has begun to reclaim ordinary process, a Senate that has so far declined to act, and a public that has grown more skeptical. Whether that combination produces formal accountability, quiet isolation, or simply continued controversy will depend less on any single televised challenge and more on whether Brazil’s institutions treat concentrated power as a temporary expedient or as a lasting arrangement. The recent reversals suggest the former is no longer automatic.
The STF failed the people, their ideas of grandiosity and superiority, blinded them. Justices who thought so highly of themselves, made it possible to act like they are above the law, arrogant and merciless. Until Brazil fixes the elite and government corruption, crime and impunity, the disease will keep contaminating until there is nothing left.