Lula government: history suggests a more fragile base in the Chamber – 02/12/2023 – Power

The history of votes in the Chamber of Deputies over the last two decades suggests that the fragility of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s (PT) base may be even greater than it appears at first sight.

Analysis of Sheet shows that the new government’s arc of alliances brings together parties with an antagonistic retrospect to that of the PT in the Legislative. This goes not only for right-wing subtitles, as would be expected, but also for some left-wing ones.

One of the most striking cases is that of the PSD, a legend that Gilberto Kassab highlighted when he said that he would not be left, nor right, nor center.

The party did not support Lula in the 2022 election campaign, but won three ministries as part of the president’s efforts to broaden its support – the PSD adds 42 deputies to the government base.

Judging by the party’s past in Congress, the nod will have uncertain results. According to the survey of SheetPSD parliamentarians even followed the PT in the first votes after its creation, in 2011, but soon adopted a growing distance from the PT.

The pattern of opposition to the PT, especially since the Dilma Rousseff government (2011-2016), also appears in the history of other acronyms in Lula’s formal base, such as MDB, Avante, Solidariedade and Pros.

The president needs to turn to these unstable allies because the left occupies only a quarter of the seats in the House. Since the election, Lula has made agreements with the center and the right to expand governance.

Together, all parties from the Lula base reach 223 parliamentarians. Even if there are no internal disagreements –something unlikely, as history shows–, the number would still be insufficient for the approval of PECs (proposed amendment to the Constitution), which requires 308 votes, or even complementary bills (257 votes). .

To gain room for manoeuvre, the government tries to retain the União Brasil, a party that ruminates internal disputes and, despite having received three ministries, declares itself independent.

Created in 2021 from the merger of the PSL with the DEM, the União Brasil has always remained distant from the PT in the House votes. And the same can be said about the parties that gave rise to it.

The extinct PSL even voted together with the PT in Lula’s first terms, but the composition and ideology of the acronym have changed radically since then – the party grew in the wake of anti-PTism and the election of Jair Bolsonaro (today in the PL) in 2018 .

The DEM, in turn, maintained a very clear pattern: if the PT voted in favor of a project, the DEM would be against it, and vice versa.

Not by chance, leaders of União Brasil, PSD and MDB maintain that support for the Lula government will be given according to an individual assessment of the guidelines, case by case.

In this way, Lula and his articulators continue to seek allies in the center and even in the opposition. The assessment is that there would be in these parliamentary sectors willing to join the government in isolation.

PP and Republicans, for example, have numerous benches and declare themselves independent – ​​not opposition. While they have formed Bolsonaro’s base for the past four years, both have recorded voting patterns close to the PT’s in the past.

In the case of the PP, the alignment took place in Lula’s first two governments. The PT strategy to regain this support included endorsing the re-election of the mayor, Arthur Lira (PP-AL).

The Republicans’ agreement was registered in the middle of Lula’s second term and lasted until Dilma’s first administration. Now, the PT is trying to attract the party’s cardinals to the government base again in 2023.

Together, União Brasil (59), PP (49) and Republicans (41) account for 149 of the 188 so-called independent deputies, while the opposition has 102.

In what was the first test for Lula –still in the previous legislature–, MDB, PSD, União Brasil and PP contributed with 144 votes for the approval of the Transition PEC. This is equivalent to 76% of the deputies of these parties. The appreciation of sensitive measures in the new government, however, tends to demand more difficult negotiations.

On the other hand, the PT attack to the right could cause problems with first-time allies in fundamental votes, such as the tax reform.

The PSOL deputies, for example, only started to vote in line with the PT after the crisis that resulted in the impeachment of Dilma. Born in 2004, as a result of dissent from the PT, the party did not shy away from making opposition at the time for ideological reasons.

Currently, the PSOL defends the collection of more taxes from the rich and criticizes the tax simplification foreseen in proposals supported by the Lula government in process.

The measure of proximity between the PT and the other parties was calculated by Sheet based on the results of 3,752 votes held in the plenary of the Chamber over the last two decades, from December 2001 to December 2022.

Favorable votes receive a value of 1, and those against, 0. The metric represents the distance between the position of each deputy and the average of the votes of PT congressmen, on this same scale.

Abstentions and unanimous votes were disregarded, as well as those that did not have the participation of any PT parliamentarian.