Attacked by the left, corruption index has already been praised by the PT

Attacked by PT militants, the report released by the NGO Transparency International – which showed a drop of ten positions for Brazil in the 2023 Corruption Perception Index (IPC) – has already been praised by PT members during opposition governments.

According to the ranking, in 2023, the first year of President Lula’s (PT) government, Brazil’s score decreased from 38 to 36 points on the IPC and placed the country on the same level as Algeria, Serbia and Ukraine – which is at war.

Among the points analyzed by Transparency International are the “degradation of institutions”; the appointment of Lula’s personal lawyer, Cristiano Zanin, to the Federal Supreme Court (STF); the choice of Paulo Gonet Branco for the position of Attorney General of the Republic (PGR) outside the triple list of the Federal Public Ministry; the “rapporteur’s amendments” in Congress; the increase in the electoral fund to R$4.9 billion this year, among others.

After the publication of the ranking, the president of the PT, federal deputy Gleisi Hoffmann (RS), attributed Brazil’s fall in the IPC to “ill will and the NGO’s political opposition to President Lula and the PT” and accused the organization of have a “long trajectory of disinformation”.

Federal deputy Lindbergh Farias (PT-RJ) said that the report has “absurd political distortions” and “is not scientific at all”.

Even the ministers of the Comptroller General of the Union, Vinicius Marques de Carvalho, and the Federal Supreme Court (STF), Gilmar Mendes, came to the government’s defense. Carvalho said that “the IPC may have selection bias” and attacked the Bolsonaro government. Gilmar Mendes stated that “an index based on perceptions needs to be viewed with caution”.

Despite the attempt to disqualify the index, previous editions of the report were endorsed by the left when they highlighted problems in combating corruption during opposition governments.

In October 2020, when commenting on the release of the report, the official PT profile on the social network said that the Bolsonaro government had promoted a “dismantling of the anti-corruption framework”.

“International transparency released reports that not only point out the obstruction of the offensive, but describe ‘a progressive institutional dismantling of anti-corruption that Brazil took decades to consolidate’”, stated the PT at the time.

The index was also endorsed in publications by the then federal deputy and current chief minister of the Secretariat of Social Communication (Secom), Paulo Pimenta (PT-RS), in the years 2017, 2020 and 2022. In the first post, on the social network , Pimenta uses the report to criticize the governo of then president Michel Temer (MDB) and the other two publications are used to attack the Bolsonaro government.

“Guess who is the least transparent? He!”, says a post by Pimenta on September 1, 2020, on the social network X.

“With Bolsonaro, Brazil is downgraded in Transparency International report on combating corruption”, says another PT publication, on October 11, 2022.