Political scientists: Lula makes mistakes with Congress – 02/06/2023 – Politics

President Lula (PT) makes mistakes in his relationship with Congress, in a scenario that is already naturally more difficult than in other governments, and he needs to make articulation adjustments, said political scientists Carlos Pereira and Beatriz Rey on TV Folha this Friday. fair (2).

Faced with the government’s difficulty in approving measures due to the lack of a base in the Chamber and the Senate, both suggested that the president rethink the support coalition, but said that coalition presidentialism did not die, as provoked by the theme of the debate mediated by the reporter from the Sheet Ranier Bragon.

The term, coined by sociologist Sérgio Abranches, refers to a tradition in Brazilian presidentialism in which the Chief Executive is elected without a parliamentary majority and has to form it from negotiations, distributing positions and funds.

Pereira, who is a professor at FGV, and Beatriz, who has a postdoctoral degree at Uerj (State University of Rio de Janeiro) and is a researcher at the POPVOX Foundation, agreed on the diagnosis that Lula is wrong to privilege the PT in the appointment of ministries and posts -keys.

The situation is complicated by the fact that the president has united around himself 14 parties that form a heterogeneous panel, with acronyms from the left to the right. To complete, the empowered and mostly divergent Congress does not easily bend to the Planalto.

“When the president assembles very large coalitions, with heterogeneous parties, without sharing powers and resources in proportion to the political weight of each one, and when this coalition is very distant from what Congress wants, then he is necessarily in hell,” he said. Pereira.

“Maybe that’s why coalition presidentialism, under Lula, can seem dead. Because he made all four of these wrong choices,” he added, commenting that Lula “is paying the price” for mismanaging his coalition and concentrating too much power in his hand. of the PT.

For the professor, the government’s defeats in recent days will follow one another if adjustments are not made. With a course correction, according to him, Lula will be able to have more legislative success without having a very high cost, with amendments and positions, but it does not mean that “he will be in paradise”.

Beatriz said she had a similar diagnosis, but reported not knowing if the adjustments will be enough. She suggested, for example, a rapprochement between the government and the Republicans, given that the party has given a high proportion of favorable votes, which would justify its incorporation into the base.

At another point, he cited União Brasil as an example of a party that causes more headaches than advantages. For her, the mixed composition of the party (the result of the merger between DEM and PSL) and the existence of divergences with the Planalto line make the ally a potential focus of problems.

Beatriz said she considers the Brazilian party system in transformation, at a time when the number of parties is reducing and, consequently, fragmentation in Congress is falling. She also recalled the fact that the conservative benches have gained space.

“The government still hasn’t made its priority agenda clear, which complicates everything”, noted the researcher, echoing criticism already made by the mayor, Arthur Lira (PP-AL).

The debaters pointed to the changes made in recent years in the mechanisms for releasing amendments as an additional obstacle. For them, the President of the Republic lost the ability to benefit allies and punish opponents with the funds, after constitutional amendments that made the payment taxable (mandatory) and set similar criteria and values ​​for all parliamentarians.

The so-called rapporteur’s amendments further disturbed the environment, concentrating unprecedented power in Parliament on the allocation of resources to electoral bases. The “singular moment” of the conjuncture, after political and party changes, was cited as an obstacle to the seams.

Beatriz evaluated that the government needs to take into account this arsenal of restrictive conditions, which are new. “Lula has fewer tools to deal with a more powerful Congress,” she said. “The same conditions as in the past do not exist and, within these worse conditions, the government is still making mistakes.”

For her, “the price of deputies”, with the demand for amendments, will only increase if the current conditions are maintained, which “is unsustainable in the long term”.

Pereira highlighted Lira’s role, stating that he “was raised to the status of all-powerful” in the government of Jair Bolsonaro (PL) and lost power with the decision of the STF (Federal Supreme Court) in December that prohibited the rapporteur’s amendments. The court considered this modality unconstitutional.

For the political scientist, Lira tries to wall the government in an effort to regain discretion over the amendments. “He wants to recover that power. This blackmail by Lira is nothing more than an attempt to recover a power that he lost,” he said.

The guests commented that a first step to improve the environment could be for Lula to resize the role of his own association, at the same time that the president’s allies on the left should reduce expectations about the implementation of a progressive agenda.

“In my opinion, Lula’s greatest restriction is called the Workers’ Party”, said Pereira, saying that it is a mistake for the president to want to contemplate internal currents of the acronym, which also live in shock, instead of serving the interests of parties that can help you in Congress.

“When it favors one of the partners over the others, it generates animosity, envy, resentment and all sorts of problems. And that complicates the game.”

Beatriz said she was surprised at the difficulty faced by Lula, having imagined that “the government would have more ability to articulate”, even with a significant opposition. In such a stony picture, she opined, “one cannot have the illusion, on the part of the PT, that a more left-wing public policy will be approved with the current Congress”.

Lula said this Friday (2) that, as his support base in Congress is insufficient for the approval of a project, the government needs to talk to opponents to win votes.

“It is necessary that you know the effort to govern. It is not just winning an election”, he told an audience of students at the Federal University of ABC, in São Bernardo do Campo (in the metropolitan region of São Paulo).

“You need to spend the whole time talking to approve something. You have to talk to those who don’t like us, with those who didn’t vote for us”, he added.

Lula won the election against Bolsonaro by a narrow margin of votes at the same time that voters chose a mostly conservative Congress.

The base of the left, led by the PT, controls only about 130 of the 513 seats in the Chamber.