On Tuesday, September 1, Justices Alexandre de Moraes and André Mendonça had a heated argument in the hallways of the Federal Supreme Court. The trigger was the release of a Federal Police report linking Moraes to messages exchanged with Daniel Vorcaro, the owner of Banco Master, who was arrested in Operation Compliance Zero. In the messages, Vorcaro asks the justice for help in “thwarting” the liquidation of the financial institution and mentions a contract worth more than R$ 129 million between Master and the law firm run by Moraes’s wife, Viviane Barci de Moraes. The episode, dubbed a “civil war” behind the scenes, exposed something more serious than a personal disagreement between two judges. It laid bare the fact that the country’s highest court is no longer able to resolve its own internal conflicts with the authority granted to it by the Constitution.
The Anatomy of War
Mendonça, the judge presiding over the Master case, decided to lift the confidentiality of the Federal Police report and argues that the matter should be brought before the full court for a ruling. Attorney General Paulo Gonet reacted by requesting that the investigation be declared null and void, arguing that Mendonça exceeded his authority by ordering the Federal Police to identify the recipient of Vorcaro’s messages without first consulting the full bench. Moraes’s response took the same path of direct confrontation. The justice is considering requesting the opening of an investigation against his colleague, while Mendonça is considering the same move in the opposite direction. It will be up to the Court’s Chief Justice, Edson Fachin, to decide if and when the matter will be brought before the full court—a decision-making process that his office was not designed to handle in the event of a dispute of this nature between peers.
No one plays by the rules
It is not appropriate at this time to point out who is right. That would be premature and, above all, contrary to the rigor that any institutional analysis requires when facts are still under investigation. What the sequence of events reveals, with uncomfortable clarity, is that none of the individuals involved—neither Moraes, nor Mendonça, nor Gonet—played by the rules of the game itself. Mendonça made confidential material public without following the procedure that the Court itself requires of its members. Gonet, who is mentioned in the very messages whose invalidation he is now seeking, is reacting to a case in which he also appears as a party—not merely as an enforcer of the law. Moraes, for his part, focuses his defense far more on the alleged procedural irregularities committed by Mendonça than on the content of the messages linking him to Vorcaro. This is a court whose members have, in practice, abandoned their own procedural rules to wage behind-the-scenes battles, turning the proceedings into more of an instrument of internal warfare than a path to the truth.
The necessary explanations, however, are still far from being sufficiently clarified to establish a hierarchy among them. Mendonça himself confirmed in a statement that he had met with Vorcaro in person in March 2025 at a tailor’s shop in São Paulo—outside the Supreme Federal Court and nearly a year before he assumed the role of reporting judge in the Master case. According to the justice, the meeting concerned Provisional Injunction No. 976—a case involving court-ordered debt payments of interest to the bank—and he limited himself to listening to the businessman. Each of these outstanding explanations carries its own weight, and all deserve a complete response, because they involve two distinct types of requirements. Explanations are due regarding the merits of the issues addressed in the meetings and in each justice’s decisions. Explanations are also due regarding the procedure, due process, and strict adherence to procedural law observed by each of them. Both requirements carry equal weight in the country’s highest court. In a court where no further appeal is possible, the dignity of the office and strict adherence to procedure carry the same institutional weight as the merits of the decisions, because there is no appellate court capable of correcting a procedural error committed at the highest level of the judiciary.
This same crisis also reveals an additional level of interference, this time between the judiciary and the electoral calendar itself. Columnists and political opponents have pointed out that Mendonça chose to order the investigation that led to the report on Moraes just over a month before the October election, even though he knew that his colleague’s alleged involvement had been public knowledge since December. This move weakens Moraes politically on the eve of the election and, at the same time, may ultimately benefit him on the judicial front, should the motion to annul filed by Gonet be accepted on procedural grounds, as has already occurred in cases involving Senator Flávio Bolsonaro and the then-Speaker of the Chamber of Deputies, Arthur Lira. The episode illustrates the extent to which one institution already exerts influence over the other. An internal crisis within the judiciary has begun to have a direct impact on the race that will determine, in October, who will appoint the next justices to that same Court.
The pattern that repeats itself in 2026
The Moraes-Mendonça episode did not arise in isolation. It is part of a series of crises that have already plagued the Brazilian judiciary throughout this year. In February, Justice Dias Toffoli stepped down as the reporting judge in the Master case after the Federal Police found, on Vorcaro’s cell phone, references to a payment related to the sale of the Tayayá resort in Paraná—a deal in which the justice acknowledged having a financial stake. His departure came under public pressure and following a three-hour meeting among the ten justices, who upheld Toffoli’s previous decisions but agreed to reassign the case, which was then handed over to Mendonça. In April, the Senate rejected Jorge Messias’s nomination to the Supreme Court by a vote of 42 to 34—the first rejection of a presidential nominee to the Court in 132 years. At the Superior Court of Justice (STJ), Justice Cristiano Zanin authorized the expansion of the investigation into the sale of rulings to the offices of two STJ justices, Paulo Dias de Moura Ribeiro and Marco Buzzi, as part of the developments in Operation Sisamnes. Three incidents, three different courts, a single symptom. The moral authority of the judiciary is being eroded from within, with or without formally established guilt.
Four seats that will be decided in the October election
The current crisis is not occurring in a temporal vacuum. Whoever wins the October presidential election will inherit, even during their own term, the prerogative to nominate at least four new justices to the Supreme Court. The first vacancy is already open. It is the seat left by Luís Roberto Barroso, who retired early in October 2025 and remains without a successor after the Senate rejected Jorge Messias’s nomination in April. The Senate’s internal rules prevent the same nominee from being resubmitted during the current legislative session, which pushes any new nomination to early 2027, under the leadership of whoever wins the election. In addition to this vacancy, there are three mandatory retirements already scheduled due to age. Luiz Fux turns 75 in April 2028. Cármen Lúcia will reach the same constitutional age limit in April 2029. Gilmar Mendes, the Court’s senior justice, will leave office in December 2030. Taken together, these four vacancies will renew more than one-third of the full bench during the next presidential term. The clash currently pitting Moraes against Mendonça is therefore taking place at a time when the very composition of the Court is about to change. The shape of this new majority will depend both on the election results and on the political capital each justice loses during the ongoing crisis—which transforms the current fight into something more than a personal dispute between two justices. It turns it into a chapter in a longer struggle over the future balance of power within the Court itself.
When Ministers Appoint Ministers
There is a third aspect that this crisis brings to light, one less tied to the Master case and more to the internal culture of the judiciary. Nominations to the Supreme Court itself rarely move forward without the explicit endorsement of sitting justices. When Flávio Dino was nominated to the STF in 2023, sources identified Gilmar Mendes as one of the key supporters, with Alexandre de Moraes and Dias Toffoli reinforcing the effort to build support among lawmakers. The selection of Paulo Gonet for the Office of the Attorney General followed a similar script, described at the time as a personal victory for Moraes and Gilmar Mendes within the Court itself. This logic of patronage is not limited to the Supreme Court itself. It is repeated in courts that, at least formally, should be more removed from the judicial policy of the highest echelons. In disputes over constitutional fifth-seat vacancies on the Superior Court of Justice (STJ), there has already been public acknowledgment of lobbying by Supreme Court justices in favor of their preferred candidates from the list drawn up by the STJ’s own panel. The same pattern has emerged in appointments to the Federal Regional Courts, with candidates publicly identified as having been endorsed by members of the STF, including Gilmar Mendes himself. André Mendonça and Kassio Nunes Marques, each in their own way, have also built careers marked by political proximity that preceded their own nominations and which today position them as key figures in the selection of new candidates. The question that remains is straightforward. Why do justices of a court that should position itself above political disputes openly participate in selecting those who will serve on courts that the STF itself reviews on appeal, or those who will oversee it, as in the case of the Attorney General’s Office (PGR)? Part of the answer lies in the constitutional framework itself, in which the president nominates and the Senate conducts confirmation hearings, with no prohibition against justices acting as informal endorsers of candidates they trust. The most uncomfortable part of the answer is that this natural dynamic normalizes a kind of reciprocity between judges from different courts and between judges and the branch of government that appoints them—the very same kind of closeness that the Moraes-Mendonça crisis now exposes in a different light.
Being in business is more than just being open
As Hans Morgenthau rightly pointed out when discussing international politics, law and norms have never been powerful enough to replace the pursuit of self-interest. This statement, intended for the arena of relations between states, applies with uncomfortable precision to the internal dynamics of the Supreme Court. The Court remains open, cases continue to be heard, plenary sessions continue to take place on Wednesdays and Thursdays, and the panels continue to adjudicate on the other days of the week. Functioning, however, requires more than just open doors. It requires maintaining public confidence in the impartiality of those who adjudicate, and that confidence erodes with each new chapter of this dispute. As Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt observe, democratic institutions rarely die from explicit coups. They erode when the actors themselves cease to exercise the self-restraint that sustains the institutional pact. This is what we are seeing in a Supreme Court where justices use the court’s own structure to attack one another, with breaches of confidentiality, technical response memos, and disputes over who will serve as rapporteur functioning as weapons of attack.
A crisis unlike any before
This is not the first time Brazil has witnessed a public clash between Supreme Court justices. The Court has already experienced heated arguments, personal insults, and disagreements that dragged on for years on end—almost always treated by the public as behind-the-scenes drama. What makes this episode different is the extent of the damage—far more so than the tone of the exchanges between the justices. In previous instances, the dispute arose and ended between two justices—a personal disagreement that did not compromise the legitimacy of the institution as a whole. This time, the epicenter is a specific case of billion-dollar fraud with the potential to undermine the integrity of one of the Court’s two most senior justices, and the damage is spreading throughout the entire system. There can be no winners in this episode. Even if one of the two resigns or is removed through impeachment proceedings, whoever remains will be, rather than a winner, merely the one left standing—and will continue as the central figure in the greatest institutional crisis in the history of the STF. The true institutional victory would be for the Supreme Court to return to normalcy and for this episode to be recorded as an isolated chapter—the product of a peculiar situation in the country—at a time of extreme fragility in democratic institutions around the world, where democracy is under regular attack.
What remains: the Court or the ballot box
There is still a chance that the crisis will be resolved internally, with Fachin repeating the conciliatory move he orchestrated with Toffoli in February, although the possibility that nothing will be done seems increasingly remote given the extent of the damage already caused. If the Court cannot find a solution on its own, the matter will be deferred until 2027, when the Senate will have to deal not only with a new post-election political landscape but also with a Supreme Court presided over by Alexandre de Moraes himself—one of the key figures in the current crisis. In this scenario, the institutional erosion currently confined within the court will spill over into the political arena, with a legislature that has already demonstrated—through its unprecedented rejection of Jorge Messias—a willingness to say no to the judiciary when it deems it necessary.
The Price of Civil War
The Master case exposed the fragility of a Court that, technically speaking, has never ceased to function. Trials take place, deadlines pass, and decisions are published, but the edifice of trust that underpins the legitimacy of any higher court requires more than just regular operations. It requires that its members apply, among themselves, the same procedural rigor that they demand of the parties they judge. While justices exchange accusations outside the formal procedures they themselves are supposed to uphold, the Supreme Court offers the country the worst of both worlds. Neither does the Court investigate with the transparency the case demands, nor do the justices themselves exhibit the self-restraint that the judicial robe should impose. Nothing in this scenario justifies the conclusion that any of the protagonists is acting in the public interest. Moraes, Mendonça, and Gonet are neither heroes nor victims in this dispute. They are driven by calculations of institutional, political, and personal survival, each with their own interests at stake. The problem is that this war, born in the offices of the Supreme Court, has already spilled beyond the Court’s walls and begun to taint the environment in which the country will choose, in October, its next president and the lawmakers who are supposed to oversee these very same institutions. The civil war within the Supreme Court, more than just a chapter in a personal dispute between two justices, is the latest portrait of a judiciary that has lost the ability to govern itself, and whose turmoil is no longer confined within its own walls. It remains to be seen whether this episode will be resolved as an isolated incident from which the Supreme Court recovers, restoring its institutional normalcy, or whether the country is facing the dawn of a new era for the court, in which personal rivalries among justices occupy the center of the Court’s institutional life—and not just its backrooms. This question goes beyond this week’s crisis. It touches on the kind of institution the Supreme Court has been transforming into for decades—a process that predates Moraes and Mendonça, will outlive both of them, and deserves separate scrutiny.
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