The Incredible Army of Brancaleone
The Republic Is Not a Fiefdom
Lawfare4All Editorial ·
In 1966, Mario Monicelli gave the world one of the most extraordinary satires in Italian cinema. In The Incredible Army of Brancaleone (L'armata Brancaleone), Vittorio Gassman plays a knight convinced of his own greatness, who gathers a makeshift troop to conquer a fiefdom. The expedition piles up heroic pretensions, hierarchical conflicts, misunderstandings and successive encounters with the ridiculous.
Sixty years later, Brazil's Electoral Justice seems to offer an involuntary adaptation of the work.
The costumes have changed, armor has given way to robes and horses have been replaced by official cars. The confusion over who is in command, however, remains cinematically recognizable.
In the role of our Brancaleone, by license of satire, Kassio Nunes Marques, the justice appointed to the Supreme Federal Court (STF) by Jair Bolsonaro and current president of the Superior Electoral Court (TSE).
It is an association that takes on particular significance in light of the presidential race between Lula and Flávio Bolsonaro, especially because decisions by the TSE president have become the subject of public questioning about their effects on electoral competition.
The origin of an appointment to the Supreme Court, of course, does not determine a justice's future orientation, much less prove loyalty to whoever made the choice. The Constitution demands precisely the opposite: independence, impartiality and the uniform application of the law.
That is precisely why the controversy deserves attention.
One troop, two commands
The episode involving the WhatsApp channel Exército do Lula ("Lula's Army"), run by congressman André Janones, offers Brazilian political cinematography a sequence Monicelli would surely have appreciated.
Following complaints filed by Flávio Bolsonaro's campaign, Nunes Marques ordered the channel suspended. Ricardo Villas Bôas Cueva, the Electoral Justice's corregedor-geral (inspector general), took the opposite view and ordered it reinstated.
The controversy continued with new rulings, requirements for regularizing the channel and disagreements over the grounds and the competence to decide.
The Presidency put forward reasons linked to the oversight of electoral advertising and the regular functioning of the tool. Objections to the intervention, in turn, concerned the sufficiency of the evidence presented, the proportionality of the restrictions and the distribution of competences within the Court itself.
On October 13, Cueva withdrew his request to submit his earlier decision to the Plenary for confirmation, in view of subsequent decisions, but reiterated the need for a collegiate solution capable of delimiting the competences of the Presidency and of the Corregedoria-Geral.
That is precisely where the institutional comedy lies: a conflict that should be resolved by the authority of the rules ends up producing a new controversy over the authority charged with applying them.
In Monicelli, the disorder of the expedition provoked laughter. In the Electoral Justice, it produces legal uncertainty.
The imaginary fiefdom
The original Brancaleone longed to possess a territory he believed was his by right. His conception of authority was typically feudal: power as conquest, land as patrimony and obedience as a natural extension of a position of command.
In the Republic, none of this should survive.
The appointment of a justice to the Supreme Court does not constitute a bond of political loyalty. Nor does the Presidency of the Superior Electoral Court grant its occupant any prerogative to administer competitive advantages in favor of a candidacy.
The Constitution recognizes no electoral fiefdoms.
That is why the relevant debate is not about a judge's personal preferences, but about the legal consistency of his interventions and the equal treatment of competitors.
The legitimacy of a decision does not derive from benefiting this or that candidate. It derives from the possibility of demonstrating that the same rule would be applied, under the same circumstances, to any of them.
That is the republican test that no institutional armor should be allowed to waive.
Beyond the walls
While the Electoral Justice manages its conflicts, popular mobilizations in defense of the Democratic Rule of Law bring back into public space a question far larger than the powers of an authority or the functioning of a digital channel: to whom does the Republic belong?
The constitutional answer does not depend on the outcome of a dispute between justices.
The demonstrations and the judicial controversy need not share a common origin to reveal two dimensions of a political problem: the relationship between institutions, popular participation and democratic legitimacy.
Society has the right to claim the direction of the State in the streets. It falls to the Electoral Justice to ensure that the different political forces can democratically compete over that direction, according to previously established rules applied impartially.
A communication channel with millions of followers is not immune to electoral law. Its possible restriction, however, requires sufficient grounds, respect for proportionality and observance of legal competences.
The same standard must apply to any candidacy.
In the middle of a runoff, decision-making instability takes on additional relevance. The suspension, reinstatement or imposition of conditions on the operation of a communication tool can produce effects that a later decision cannot fully neutralize.
In politics, as in cinema, time is also part of the plot.
Lawfare: the referee at the center of the match
The most worrying dimension of this tragicomedy lies not in the personality of its protagonists, but in the possibility that jurisdictional conflicts may interfere with the actual conditions of electoral competition.
Investigating possible practices of lawfare must consider not only the formal legality of decisions, but also the possible existence of patterns of selectivity, asymmetries of treatment, strategic choice of procedures and targeted use of legal mechanisms.
The Exército do Lula episode raises precisely this question: to what extent can a controversy over electoral communication be aggravated by internal disputes over the competences of those who must resolve it?
The problem is institutional, and its consequences go beyond the protagonists of the dispute.
A democracy cannot depend on the ability of its participants to discover, at every play, which authority is allowed to blow the whistle.
The Republic is not a fiefdom
Monicelli built his work on a masterful contradiction: the harder Brancaleone tried to embody the grandeur of chivalry, the more evident the precariousness of his enterprise became.
The grandeur was in the speech. The disorder, in practice.
The image offers a particularly timely warning to the Brazil of October 2026. It is not enough for authorities to proclaim a commitment to democracy, invoke institutional harmony and present themselves as guardians of legality. Their acts must be consistent with what they proclaim.
True republican authority does not need to conquer electoral territories or win battles of competence against its own peers.
It needs to guarantee that the democratic contest takes place under clear rules, without privileges stemming from the political origin of whoever occupies the judge's chair.
Beyond the imaginary walls, society may recall a distinction that Brazilian history insists on making necessary:
The Republic is not a fiefdom. The Constitution is not a charter of vassalage. And the popular vote is not the spoils of war.
Monicelli made a comedy about men who imagined themselves greater than history itself.
The Brazilian version invites us to reflect on the risk of institutions that imagine themselves greater than democracy.
And on this expedition, no one needs to win for everyone to lose.
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