Centrão is still a pejorative word – 07/19/2023 – Sérgio Rodrigues

It is not common to find such a candid attempt to recycle the meaning of a word and sprinkle perfume on the language as that of the new Minister of Tourism in an interview published this Wednesday (19) by Sheet.

Celso Sabino (União Brasil-PA) told reporters Thiago Resende and Victoria Azevedo that “in the past people used to talk about the centrão as a pejorative thing. Now the centrão is already becoming a positive thing”.

This supposed change was due, according to him, to the virtue of “weighting”. He explained: “I’m not looking for extremes, but I want to do what’s best for our country, social policies that are important for Brazil.”

Of course, the word centrão continues to carry as much pejorative content as it ever did. Allied with the mayor and leader of the group, Arthur Lira (PP-AL), the Minister of Tourism deliberately shuffles the semantic files of the nouns center and centrão, which are very different.

The name centrão emerged in the 1980s during the debates of the Constituent Assembly, in the government of José Sarney. Since then it has been used to designate a group of parliamentarians who may or may not be centrist in the classic political sense.

This ends up mattering little because the main characteristic of these politicians is that they do not have a very clear political-ideological profile, although they tend towards conservatism. This pasty consistency makes them always ready to join without blushing any government – any government at all – in exchange for funds, positions, advantages, influence, power.

That’s what the group is doing once again in Lula’s third term, a center-left politician with whom it negotiates spaces in exchange for legislative viability — which explains, evidently, the appointment of Sabino himself.

This is also what the centrão did in the unfortunate government of Jair Bolsonaro, an extreme right-wing politician from whom he received a blank check called the secret budget. This is the “weightedness” of the group, its dedication to “doing what is best for our country”.

It must not be concluded from this that everything is exactly where it has always been. As political scientist Sérgio Abranches noted in an article last month, the power relations of governance, which have entered into crisis in recent years, are currently being renegotiated.

However, Abranches points out, under these changes our model continues to be “coalition presidentialism” (an expression coined by him). The block today led by Lira is the result of a system in which “the relationship between the presidential vote and the vote for deputies is tenuous, given the difference between the electoral colleges, national for presidents and state for parliamentarians”.

Those benefiting from — or at least conforming to — such a model like to say that without the centrão it would be impossible to govern Brazil. It is understood, but let’s agree that it has not been possible to govern very well with him either.

In any case, between negotiating pragmatically with the centrão and believing that it has become an association of virtuous republican maidens, there is more than enough distance to make the Minister of Tourism’s statement a matter of comedy.

After all, although it is, in its name, the opposite of the extreme, a kind of “normality” in the Brazilian fashion, the center clearly suffers from at least one type of excess — the excess of cheekiness to exploit the weaknesses of our political model as a parasite .

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