Padilha sees change between Bolsonaro and Lula’s give and take – 05/12/2023 – Politics

The Minister of Institutional Relations, Alexandre Padilha (PT), said this Friday (12) that the Lula government (PT) changed the payment of parliamentary amendments in relation to the take-over of Jair Bolsonaro’s management from water to wine. (PL).

The statement was made after a solemn session in honor of health workers, at Alesp (Legislative Assembly of São Paulo), in celebration of World Nursing Day.

“The difference is like water for wine. So much so that you can say exactly who the resources were released to”, he said. “It has nothing to do with the so-called secret budget, we are doing politics in broad daylight.”

Padilha said that the government has disbursed the remainder of past management. “We have already released around R$4 billion to pay for amendments, resources that the previous government had defaulted on in states and municipalities. These are resources authorized by the Federal Supreme Court,” he said.

Lula has distributed parliamentary positions and amendments to deputies and senators in exchange for political support in Congress, in practice of the old policy used by different governments and known as take there and give it here.

The minister stated, however, that this is now done with transparency. “We are committing the resources of the 2023 budget, which are individual amendments by each parliamentarian, they are registered there, everyone knows who they are, absolute transparency”.

According to him, the government invested around BRL 1.6 billion in this type of amendment, three times more than the Bolsonaro government committed in the same period. For Padilha, this shows that the Lula government is committed to dialogue with Congress, that nominations for priority projects will be supported.

This week, for example, Lula accelerated the release of amendments after losing a vote in the National Congress and threats of new setbacks.

About R$ 1.15 billion of the individual quota of parliamentarians was pledged this week.

For the remainder of the year, the committed amount had not yet reached R$ 200 million. The PT management still plans to start disbursing, in the coming weeks, resources related to the rapporteur’s old amendments, which total R$ 9.85 billion.

Government members claim that the schedule for implementing the amendments already established that the delivery of the funds would gain traction from May. The amount committed until Wednesday (10) represents about 6% of the R$ 21.2 billion foreseen for individual amendments in 2023.

The Lula government has been criticized for problems in political articulation. The situation gained new proportions last week with the first relevant defeat in the National Congress, with the overthrow by federal deputies of the decree that changed some rules in the Sanitation Framework.

Parliamentarians demand greater agility from the government, especially to unlock the release of the resource that was incorporated into the Executive’s budget after the STF (Federal Supreme Court) declared the rapporteur’s amendments unconstitutional, at the end of last year.

During the election campaign, Lula even called the rapporteur’s amendments the “biggest corruption scheme today”, “secret budget” and “bolsolão”.

The PT administration, however, decided to keep in the hands of the centrão some of the bodies that had their budget boosted by the rapporteur’s amendment, such as Codevasf (Companhia de Desenvolvimento dos Vales do São Francisco e do Parnaíba).