Brazil’s top election authority, the Superior Electoral Tribunal (TSE), suspended the presidential campaign of outsider right-wing candidate Renan Santos on Monday for allegedly using “unregistered” social media and other online resources in the campaign.
Santos condemned the suspension as “absurd” and stated that he will file an injunction seeking relief against the ruling. Other Brazilian presidential candidates have publicly expressed their support for Santos over his suspension by the TSE.
Santos, a 42-year-old politician, is one of 13 candidates running for president of Brazil in the October elections. He is the nominee of the right-wing Mission Party. Santos is also one of the founders of the Free Brazil Movement (MBL), an organization largely credited with organizing protests against the government of socialist former President Dilma Rousseff in the mid-2010s.
According to Brazilian outlets, Supreme Court Justice José Antonio Dias Toffoli — who is the current head of the TSE — suspended Santos and his vice presidential running mate Arnoldo Medina’s campaign on the grounds that the campaign allegedly failed to disclose and report multiple websites, blogs, social media platforms, and messaging apps that were being actively used by the campaign.
Per Jovem Pan, the suspension bans Santos from participating in debates on television, radio, or other media and prohibits him from conducting online election campaigns, receiving new disbursements from Brazil’s Special Campaign Financing Fund for his presidential ticket, and incurring in new expenses from the fund. The ruling was reportedly issued on Sunday but published on Monday.
One such account mentioned in the ruling, Jovem Pan detailed, is Santos’s Instagram account, where he has over 2.4 million followers. The TSE reportedly affirmed that the account “posted campaign advertisements and appeared in recommendations for other candidates.” The Instagram account’s profile description has since been changed, and reads, “presidential candidate censored by Dias Toffoli,” with a “censored” photo of Santos.
Justice Toffoli reportedly gave Santos a 24-hour deadline to provide the TSE with extensive details on a list of 16 social media accounts linked to his now-suspended campaign under penalty of a daily fine of 50,000 Brazilian reais (roughly $9,700). Santos must also provide TSE with information of any other website, blogs, social network, instant messaging users or groups, and similar internet applications used by the campaign under penalty of the same fine.
Toffoli reportedly stated in the ruling that existing social media profiles or websites must be reported by the corresponding electoral campaign group at the time of registration and that any new accounts must be reported within 24 hours of creation. All accounts, the TSE Justice further stated, can only be used by a campaign after 48 hours of being reported to the electoral authority — a “necessary” step to allow for campaign advertising oversight.
Santos condemned his suspension as “absurd” speaking with Jovem Pan on Monday, and stated, “It is a decision made on the authority’s own initiative that brings down an entire campaign.”
The outsider candidate also referred to the situation in a social media post in which he prefaced that August 31 marks a “special date” for him, as it is the ten-year anniversary of former President Rousseff’s impeachment. Santos said that he has since then appealed Toffoli’s “authoritarian swerve.”
“Today, Mr. José Antonio Dias Toffoli, former lawyer for [President] Lula and current STF justice, has decided through an autocratic ruling to suspend my candidacy for the presidency,” Santos’s message read in part.
“According to the minister’s decision, I must delete my social media accounts and refrain from commenting on the case,” he continued. “Through this statement, I reiterate the guiding principle of our Constitution: An illegal decision is not to be obeyed.”
Other Brazilian presidential candidates have publicly expressed their support for Santos since his suspension. Conservative Senator Flavio Bolsonaro, son of former President Jair Bolsonaro, expressed that he hopes Santos’s candidacy is reinstated and stressed that censorship can no longer be trivialized in Brazil, referring to his father’s situation.
Jair Bolsonaro is currently serving a 27-year prison sentence for “crimes against democracy” under strict house arrest in his residence in Brasília. The former president is legally unable to speak to the press, use social media, phones, computers, or any kind of communication device. He is also banned from seeing anyone outside of his medical and legal team until after the 2026 presidential election by order of Justice Alexandre de Moraes.
Conservative presidential candidate Romeu Zema said in a social media post that although he disagrees with Santos on many points, he finds Justice Toffoli’s ruling to be “an absurdity.” Zema affirmed that he will not stay silent on the matter just because he is a competitor in the race, and stressed, “The problems runs much deeper than that.”
“No democracy can hold up this way, with a Supreme Court already worn down by numerous decisions, inquiries, and schemes that only tarnish the institution and Brazil’s image abroad,” Zema wrote. “Enough with the untouchables.”
Similarly, former Goiás governor Ronaldo Caiado, who is running for president for the Social Democratic Party said that, as an opposing candidate, he does not feel benefited by the measure against Santos.
“Justice must be respected, but I consider the measure disproportionate. Elections are decided by the vote, with all candidates having the right to present their ideas to Brazilians,” Caiado wrote.
Incumbent socialist President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who is running for office for a fourth term in the upcoming election, has not publicly commented on the suspension of Renan Santos at press time.
Christian K. Caruzo is a Venezuelan writer and documents life under socialism. You can follow him on Twitter here.