Lula’s new ministry – 08/26/2023 – Celso Rocha de Barros

Lula is expected to announce his new ministry this week. It is possible that it is a worse ministry. It is also possible that, precisely because of this, the government will become more capable of passing its bills through Congress.

When Lula announced the current ministry, I thought it was too good to be true. In Brazilian coalition presidentialism, the president builds his support base in Congress by distributing, among other things, ministries to parties that have many parliamentarians. The sum of votes that Lula’s current ministers guarantee in Congress is not enough to govern in the Brazilian system.

Elected by the broad front of 2022, the Lula government has a more centrist ideological profile than that of other PT governments. But the current Congress has a majority of parties that supported Bolsonaro by ideology and/or secret budget.

The correlation of forces is what it is. Lula will have to hand over ministries to the centrão if he wants to govern.

In this week’s reform, Lula should appoint two ministers from the centrão: André Fufuca (PP-MA) and Silvio Costa Filho (Republicanos-PE). Fufuca has great chances of winning the Ministry of Ports and Airports, currently with Márcio França (PSB-SP). Maybe there will be dismemberment of ministries to accommodate Costa Filho. If Márcio França is reassigned to another ministry, the cascading changes could be bad for the left.

I hope this can be avoided. If I could choose, I would prefer to hand over to the center the command of bodies or autarchies that would satisfy, within the law, its appetite for resources, but keep it out of public policy decisions.

But that is also difficult, because next year there is an election for mayor. Those who control the allocation of more funds should have an easier time electing their allies. It is no wonder that the PT does not want to lose control of the folder that administers the Bolsa Família. PT is right.

It is good to remember that having an eternally conservative Congress does not necessarily reflect the preferences of the Brazilian electorate. Brazilian democracy was built in the 1980s with the political class inherited from the dictatorship, a period of systematic persecution of the left. The various governments of the New Republic, including those on the left, had to make agreements with these traditional political machines in order to govern. They survived and were the great winners of the political crisis of the last ten years.

That’s why, every now and then, the center right appears to me with talk of “semi-presidentialism”. These are people who have already given up on electing President of the Republic and prefer to transfer power to Congress, where the right always has a majority.

The good news for Lula is that the post-Bolsonaro centrão’s ideological turn seems to be cooling off. In the vote on the fiscal framework, for example, more than half of the PL voted in favor of the government. The PL has more and more people who may even be from the “P”, but, if necessary, do the “L”.

It remains to be hoped that this week’s ministerial reform guarantees the approval of the rest of Fernando Haddad’s agenda, including measures of a redistributive nature. It would be a sign that we have, I’m even afraid to say it out loud and it’s bad luck, but, come on, functioning institutions.

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