Is coalition presidentialism dead? – 05/27/2023 – Celso Rocha de Barros

Last Tuesday (23), Lula went to Congress and had a great victory: the new fiscal regime was approved with an overwhelming vote.

The following day, Lula returned to Congress and was beaten. In a single day, Parliament emptied Lula’s ministries, removing competences from the Environment and Indigenous Peoples ministries, approved urgency for voting on the time frame for demarcating indigenous lands and released a trick that allows deforestation of the Atlantic forest.

Lula was not introduced yesterday to Brazilian coalition presidentialism, in which the president is elected without a parliamentary majority and has to form it by distributing positions and funds. He has now run the system for eight years and survived. What has changed?

Some critics point to problems with its current management of the model. For example, the government may have accepted the slicing of the Environment to avoid the slicing of the Civil House, which controls much more resources. If so, that reinforces the thesis of political scientist Carlos Pereira, who has been insisting that Lula needs to share government resources more proportionately among his allies.

On the other hand, there are two notable differences between the Congress that Lula found now and its 2003 three-powers square neighbor.

For scientist Sergio Abranches, creator of the concept of “coalition presidentialism”, “the model has entered a crisis in recent years, but presidents continue to be elected without a parliamentary majority”.

Congress accumulated power during the string of weak presidents (Dilma, Temer and Bolsonaro) and does not want to give it back to Lula or any other chief executive. As Arthur Lira has already made clear, parliamentarians want a larger chunk of the Budget to be distributed in the form of parliamentary amendments, and not spending on public policies by the federal government. This reduces the effectiveness of strategic, long-term policies and throws more resources into regional policy, where the press and authorities are less scrutinized.

In addition, Congress seems more ideological. Not by chance, Lula’s great success in Congress was the fiscal regime, which is not as restrictive as the conservative majority wanted, but reflects important concessions from the left. The government’s defeats were in the environment, indigenous rights and the fight against fake news, guidelines in which it is the right that does not want to be subjected to any limits.

Part of this problem is conjunctural: there is a dispute over the right-wing rival of the PT in presidential disputes, a position that for many years was held by the PSDB. Political scientist Fernando Limongi notes that the right-wing parties that previously adhered to any government (PP, PL, Republicans, etc.) now consider waiting for the next presidential election to assume power, making it difficult to form a new majority.

In the long term, it may be good for parties like the PL, PP or PSD to seek to acquire clearer ideological identities as they grow and become PT rivals in presidential elections. In the short term, however, Lula lives in the worst of all worlds: a Congress still without enough ideology to dispense with the distribution of positions and funds, but already ideological enough to block left-wing proposals, including the good ones.

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