The minister and vice-president of the TSE (Superior Electoral Court) André Mendonça ordered the removal of two videos published by the candidate and president for re-election Lula (PT), arguing that he makes statements against rival Flávio Bolsonaro (PL) without concrete elements to support such statements.
In one of them, the president says that "if Flávio wins, you will lose free medicine, retirement, the minimum wage, the end of the 6x1 scale, the dream of owning your own home." In the other, he states that his rival, if elected, will "cut back on Pé-de-Meia, Farmácia Popular, Minha Casa, Minha Vida, school meals, the people's gas." And he also says that he will not give "an increase in the minimum wage for workers above inflation" and "an increase in the minimum wage for retirees".
The minister and president of the TSE Kassio Nunes Marques ordered the removal of a post by First Lady Janja Lula da Silva. In it, Janja states that Flávio "will destroy" women's rights, that he "wants you to work seven days a week" and that he "will end" the Farmácia Popular program.
He also says that with Flávio Bolsonaro in the Presidency, organized crime "will dominate Brazil" and weapons will return "to their homes". And that, if there is a new pandemic, there would be “open graves” again.
In one of his decisions, Mendonça states that "the right to formulate political criticisms and prognoses is not to be confused with the possibility of presenting as certain, without minimal factual support, concrete consequences of special gravity for the lives of voters."
According to Mendonça, "propaganda presents as a certain consequence a generalized threat to the continuity of social policies, without pointing out a minimum factual basis that authorizes such a conclusion."
He adds that this scenario presented would still be "in apparent contradiction with commitments expressed in the government plan registered" by Flávio with the TSE.
Kassio, in turn, says that not all passages in Janja's video go beyond the limits of political criticism, but that the piece "mixes different categories and gives them all the same treatment of certainty".
According to him, the post, by attributing to Flávio "as certain facts and without minimum ballast, the intention of imposing seven-day-a-week working hours on workers, the purpose of extinguishing the Popular Pharmacy Program and handing the country over to the domain of organized crime, inserted in a chain that also attributes to him the repetition of deaths from the pandemic, overflows with political criticism to publicize facts that are known to be untrue and seriously out of context".
