Legal limbo puts unelected judge in charge of Rio de Janeiro

RIO DE JANEIRO (CN) — For more than a month, Rio de Janeiro has been governed by an unelected judge who still presides over the state’s highest court, while the Supreme Court has yet to decide whether the state’s next chief executive will be chosen by voters or by state lawmakers.

The Supreme Court took up the case on April 8. The next day, justices formed a 4-1 majority in favor of indirect elections, but the proceedings were suspended after one justice requested more time to review the matter. No date has been set for the case to resume.

In the meantime, Ricardo Couto, an appellate judge and the head of Rio’s Court of Justice, has become more than a temporary caretaker. As acting governor, his administration has dismissed 1,754 public employees and opened audits in state agencies and departments.

His administration has also moved into sensitive areas. In public security, it transferred programs previously run by other parts of the government to the Military Police. It also moved to give greater autonomy to the state’s forensic services.

The dispute over Rio’s succession has taken on national significance not only because it involves Brazil’s second-largest state economy, but also because the Supreme Court’s decision could guide future succession crises in other states.

Paulo Roberto dos Santos Corval, a law professor at Fluminense Federal University, said the judiciary’s delay in settling the succession dispute has turned what should have been a transitional arrangement into a democratic problem.

Rio de Janeiro’s electorate surpassed 13 million voters in 2024, giving the state the third-largest voting population in Brazil.

“It is not good for Rio de Janeiro’s democracy to have an interim governor, the president of the Court of Justice, occupying a political position,” Corval said. “Democracy needs to return to society, and in our constitutional system that happens through representative democracy, with democratic institutions functioning.”

Ticking clock on elections

Couto took over as interim governor after then-Governor Cláudio Castro resigned on March 23, one day before the Superior Electoral Court concluded a case that declared him ineligible for eight years for abuse of political and economic power in the 2022 elections. Because Castro had already left office, the loss of his mandate was deemed moot.

The resignation found Rio’s line of succession dismantled. The state already had no vice governor, and the then-president of the Legislative Assembly, next in the line of succession, could not take office after being targeted by judicial and electoral decisions.

That left the government to Couto.

But the sequence between Castro’s resignation and the electoral court ruling opened another dispute: whether the governor serving the remainder of the term should be chosen by voters or by state lawmakers.

Under Rio’s Constitution, a double vacancy caused by non-electoral reasons leads to an indirect election in the Legislative Assembly. Brazil’s Electoral Code provides for a direct election when the vacancy stems from an electoral court decision.

That distinction led the Social Democratic Party, the party of former Rio de Janeiro Mayor Eduardo Paes, a candidate for state governor, to take the case to the Supreme Court.

The party argues that Castro’s resignation could not be examined in isolation because it came on the eve of an electoral ruling that could change the state’s succession.

Paulo Henrique Cassimiro, a political science professor at Rio de Janeiro State University, said the delay at the Supreme Court may end up narrowing the window for a special election before the regular October vote.

Some Supreme Court justices appear to be betting on the calendar, Cassimiro said.

“The strategy is to delay this decision as much as possible so that, when it becomes necessary to make it, the argument will be that there is no time to hold two elections,” he said. “So what does this governor have to do at this moment? Make purely administrative decisions, which is what he is doing.”

Cassimiro said Couto has focused on the part of executive power that does not depend on lawmakers. Because the interim administration is short-lived, Couto does not need to build a base in the Legislative Assembly, pass a budget or negotiate changes in legislation.

Those decisions, however, still have political consequences. Cassimiro said that by removing appointed officials linked to Castro’s group, Couto is weakening the network that controlled part of the state machinery.

Alketa Peci, a public administration professor at Fundação Getulio Vargas, said the interim administration has stood out “in an unusual way” for measures aimed at administrative cleanup and more efficient use of public resources.

Peci said a transitional administration usually has less political discretion and focuses on administrative continuity.

“But Rio de Janeiro is not a normal case. It is a continuous case of crisis management,” Peci said.

Still, Peci said the situation creates tension between the typical role of the judiciary and that of the executive branch, even when the succession is formally provided for.

Corval said the narrative that Rio lives in permanent chaos may reinforce the idea that society needs to be protected from its own political process by an authority outside the political system.

Beyond Rio

The case may also deepen Supreme Court precedents on state succession, especially the distinction between electoral and non-electoral vacancies, he said.

The court had already recognized states’ authority to regulate succession in cases involving non-electoral vacancies, as well as the application of federal law when a vacancy stems from an electoral decision, Corval added.

But the Rio case, he said, shows that the current design may be hard to carry out when there is a judicial dispute, an election year and little time to organize a new vote in a large state.

“Perhaps the solutions we have established are not the best ones,” Corval said. “The fact is that we are in May without an elected governor.”

Peci said that although Rio’s case is highly unusual, the Supreme Court’s decision could create a political and institutional precedent for other states facing a double vacancy, removal from office or a dispute between direct and indirect elections.

States with weaker institutions, fragmented legislatures or a history of fiscal crises may become more vulnerable to improvised arrangements in similar situations, she said.

“Rio, precisely because of its visibility and the complexity of its administration, may produce a landmark legal precedent on succession, legitimacy and the powers of transitional governments,” Peci said.

In a statement, Rio’s Casa Civil, the governor’s chief-of-staff office, said the dismissals followed internal audits of state departments, agencies and state-owned companies. The audits found functional irregularities, including missing records of access to government systems and lack of formal accreditation, the office said.

Changes in strategic areas, including public security and forensic services, followed technical and administrative criteria, according to the office. The public security changes were designed to improve the operation of those policies, the office said.

The office also said that “governing, even on an interim basis, requires responsibility and continuous action,” and that Couto’s measures are grounded in law, administrative transparency and the duty to keep public services running.

Courthouse News reporter Marília Marasciulo is based in Brazil.