Brazil Supreme Federal Tribunal (STF) Justice José Antonio Dias Toffoli on Tuesday reversed his suspension of the presidential campaign of outsider right-wing candidate Renan Santos a day after he ordered it.
The reinstatement allows Santos to once again publish electoral propaganda, receive electoral federal funding, and participation in electoral debates.
Justice Toffoli is the current president of the Superior Electoral Tribunal (TSE), the top electoral authority in Brazil. On Monday, Toffoli ordered the complete suspension of Santos’s presidential campaign on grounds that the campaign was allegedly using “unregistered” websites, blogs, social media accounts, and other messaging resources. Santos is one of the 13 candidates running for president of Brazil in the upcoming October 4 general elections, representing the outsider right-wing Mission Party.
Santos described his suspension as “absurd” and had already reportedly filed an injunction request against the ruling before it was reversed. Several Brazilian presidential candidates, including conservative Senator Flávio Bolsonaro, stood in support of Santos against the suspension. Some of the candidates noted that, despite being rivals in the race, they had nothing to gain from Santos’s suspension.
On Tuesday, a day after the suspension was published, Justice Toffoli surprisingly reversed his own decision and reinstated Santos and his running mate Arnoldo Medina’s campaign. According to Poder 360, the reinstatement orders were published by the TSE while Santos was concluding a press conference at the São Paulo Museum of Art on the subject of his suspension.
According to Jovem Pan, Santos told reporters after the press conference that he did not expect the decision, “and I didn’t expect it to come today.”
“Officially, our campaign is back. Officially, our social media accounts are coming back. My Instagram is already back for most people in Brazil, and YouTube will be back soon,” Santos reportedly said. “I’m already rescheduling the campaign events that were canceled.”
“So we lost 24 to 48 hours of campaigning. Now, we’re going to pick up where we left off, but with much more energy than before,” he continued.
The outsider candidate reportedly attributed the reinstatement of his presidential campaign to the reaction of Brazilian society. He also affirmed that Toffoli reversed the suspension to “get out of the spotlight” amid reports of a purported “civil war” brewing between STF Justices André Mendonça and Alexandre de Moraes. Per the BBC, the dispute between the two justices began after Mendonça unsealed a Brazilian Federal Police report regarding messages attributed to banker Daniel Vorcaro sent to a contact listed as “Alexandre de Moraes.” Vorcaro was arrested last year for his alleged role in a massive fraud scandal involving the Brazilian bank Banco Master.
“I didn’t expect this decision to come, and I didn’t expect it to happen today. Faced with a nuclear war at the Supreme Court involving Moraes, he wanted to step out of the spotlight,” Santos reportedly said. “I am certain this decision was humiliating for Dias Toffoli and that he didn’t want it. Toffoli emerged from this looking diminished.”
“My rivals reacted, and other ministers were embarrassed. He backtracked because he couldn’t sustain his position,” he continued.
According to reports from Brazilian outlets, Justice Toffoli justified the suspension of Renan Santos’s campaign based on a list of websites, blogs, social media accounts, and messaging platform accounts allegedly used by the campaign that were not registered with the TSE. According to Brazilian outlets, Toffoli wrote in the reinstatement ruling that Santos provided the information required on the creation of the online profiles used in the campaign. The justice reportedly affirmed that the “precautionary” suspension of the campaign was “necessary” to preserve the accounts’ data.
Prior to the reinstatement, O Globo reported that Facebook and Instagram parent company Meta and social media platform TikTok had suspended accounts on their respective platforms listed in the TSE order. Globonews later detailed that Justice Toffoli gave a two-hour deadline to Meta and TikTok to reinstate the suspended accounts.
Christian K. Caruzo is a Venezuelan writer and documents life under socialism. You can follow him on Twitter here.