100 days: Lula was good at fixing what Jair broke – 08/04/2023 – Celso Rocha de Barros

The Lula government began by defeating the coup of Bolsonaro’s terrorists, the same ones who tried to blow up Brasília’s airport on Christmas Eve. It stopped the genocide of the Yanomami, for whom Damares Alves, in whose ministry one of the terrorists at the airport worked, proposed denying them water.

He expelled prospectors from prohibited areas and revoked decrees that armed Bolsonarist banditry. He started to fix the dozens of things that Jair Bolsonaro broke, from fighting deforestation to the vaccine program, from Bolsa Família to Mais Médicos.

In this first aspect, fixing something that Jair broke, Lula started very well. And they were difficult tasks: the great insight of conservatism, which never reached the ears of Olavos in this world, is that breaking is easy, repairing is difficult.

In the economic area, the government had bad moments, such as the mess that Carlos Lupi made with payroll interest for retirees. And there was a lot of noise, as in Lula’s fight with the president of the Central Bank.

In part, this reflected a national learning process: Lula is the first president to live with a Bacen whose command he did not appoint. Public opinion sided with the president, showing that debates about the causes of high interest rates should be more common in the Brazilian public sphere.

But Lula’s tone, personalizing the criticism, was a mistake: if Campos Neto had been an infiltrator of the extreme right, he would have left interest rates low in 2022 and provided the chicken flight that would certainly have re-elected Bolsonaro and preserved the position of the airport terrorist .

Despite the noise, Lula has not taken any decision that would harm Brazilian macroeconomic management, and the economic proposals he is presenting to Congress are very good.

In the previous column, I spoke of the fiscal framework, a reasonable commitment that should stabilize the debt/GDP ratio in the coming years. Lula’s next step in the economic area is tax reform, highly praised by economists, including those who never voted for the PT. If a good tax reform passes, Lula without a rise in commodities will have done more for Brazilian long-term growth than Lula with a rise in commodities.

Lula also opened discussions about the new secondary education, an idea that we don’t know exactly if it was really bad or if it was just bad luck to have Jair Bolsonaro as president on the scheduled date for its implementation. After all, if the Marshall Plan had been implemented by Vélez and Weintraub, in 15 days Nazism would have become the outcome of the war.

Anyway, Lula decided not to revoke the new secondary education, but to try to fix it: if it works, this will show the PT’s competence to take the next step in social policies, after its successful income transfer programs.

Anyway, it was a hundred days of an ideologically heterogeneous government, which had a threat of a coup in its first week. Lula has to balance his popular base, constantly harassed by radical right WhatsApp groups, and his new centrist allies. Fortunately, in addition to an infinity of crises, he ended up inheriting a repertoire of good ideas about public policies that circulated through the area from the center to the left in the four years that we spent listening to Jair talk about the golden shower.

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