Moraes Toasted Lula’s Re-Election With the Senator Who Decides Whether He Faces Impeachment

BRASILIA — Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes and Senate President Davi Alcolumbre spent one of their standing weekly lunches in Brasilia celebrating Lula’s re-election. For both men, the result closed a file that had been opening against them. Alcolumbre keeps a clear path to hold the Senate chair, and the impeachment drive against Moraes — which people inside the Court itself had started treating as a matter of when, not if — lost its political engine overnight.

The justice who polices Brazil’s elections and the senator who holds every impeachment petition filed against that justice sat at the same table to celebrate the same winner. Nobody in Brasilia is calling it a conflict.

The two offices are not equal, and that is the point. Under Senate rules, a petition to remove a Supreme Court justice goes nowhere unless the president of the Senate decides to move it. Dozens of petitions against Moraes have been filed since he began ordering arrests, account takedowns and asset freezes against the government’s critics. Not one has advanced. Alcolumbre has kept them in a drawer, and the rules require him to give no vote, no debate and no public reason for it. Even critics of Bolsonaro have said in public that Moraes bends the law to the target, and it changed nothing, because the only office that could act on that was never going to.

Why it matters to Washington

Moraes is not a minor figure in American policy. The U.S. Treasury designated him under the Global Magnitsky Act in 2025 over censorship and politically driven prosecutions, and his orders have repeatedly landed on American platforms operating in Brazil. Whether he stays on the bench is therefore not internal housekeeping in Brasilia. It decides who signs the next takedown order against a company headquartered in California, and who signs the next arrest warrant for a Brazilian who talks to a foreign audience. For Washington, a re-elected Lula and an untouchable Moraes arrive as one package.

The arithmetic in the Senate explains the relief at that lunch. Alcolumbre counts as many as 48 votes to keep the chair. Senator Rogerio Marinho (PL-RN), the opposition candidate, claims the same 48. The chamber is split down the middle, and whoever wins inherits the only key to the impeachment file — which makes a routine internal election the most consequential vote in Brazil for the justice who has jailed more of the government’s opponents than any other.

The alliance behind the lunch is older than this election. In August, Moraes hosted Lula, Alcolumbre and Justice Cristiano Zanin for dinner at his own residence, a reconciliation after the Senate rejected Jorge Messias, Lula’s nominee for the Court. The head of the country’s most aggressive bench, the head of the Senate and the head of the executive repairing relations in private, over dinner, is the arrangement Brazil now treats as ordinary government.

The record

What is documented is the mechanism: the Senate president alone decides whether an impeachment petition against a justice is ever read, and under Alcolumbre none has been. What is reported — and rests on the account published by the Brazilian magazine Revista Oeste, not on any official record — is the celebration itself and the private dinner in August. The vote counts both camps cite for the Senate presidency are claims made by those camps, not tallies. The Watch Post Daily keeps that distinction.

Strip away the conviviality and the structure is plain. The official who can end Moraes’s career and the justice whose career depends on him are personal allies who eat together every week, and both of them just won. This happens under a government whose 2022 victory remains disputed by millions of Brazilians who allege electronic ballot fraud, and whose 2026 numbers produced legislative results nobody in Brasilia has explained even as analysts there concede Lula came out of the race smaller than he went in. Accountability in Brazil is no longer something the institutions deliver reluctantly. It is something a small circle of men settle over lunch.

The Watch Post Daily will continue to follow this story.

Featured image: Plenário do Senado by Agência Senado, via Wikimedia Commons, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0.