Without a support base, the government’s agenda is played by Congress

After nearly five months in office, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT) has still not managed to implement his own legislative agenda or secure a solid parliamentary majority to move it forward. The main projects related to the economy, such as the fiscal framework and tax reform, are being molded according to the ideas of the center-right, as these are more society’s guidelines than the PT’s mandate. Proposals tend, therefore, to gain final texts that distance them from what was originally presented by the government and/or its allies in Parliament.

In addition, defeats in votes in the Chamber and the opening of parliamentary commissions of inquiry (CPIs) reveal that the government has not been able to maintain loyalty or expand the coalition formed from the parties that supported it in the second round of the 2022 elections. To deal with this, the PT administration has retreated towards the model attacked by Lula and adopted in the administration of former President Jair Bolsonaro (PL), in which Congress expanded its autonomy and its role.

The practical result of the reality shock was the release by the government, in just two days, Tuesday (9) and Wednesday (10), of almost R$ 1.2 billion in dammed parliamentary amendments. The defeats in the previous week, in votes on the Fake News projects and against the sanitation decrees, turned on the yellow light, forcing Lula to personally mobilize.

On Thursday (11), the head of the political articulation of the Planalto, the Minister of Institutional Relations, Alexandre Padilha, tried to give an air of normality to the release of billions with Treasury resources, and stated that the pace of commitment of parliamentary amendments ” strictly follows what is established by the Budgetary Guidelines Law (LDO)”.

Budget resources dictate the relationship between government and Congress

For analyst Marcos Queiroz, from Arko Advice, the Lula government did not necessarily return to the practice adopted in the previous administration, since, strictly speaking, expedients involving budgetary resources “were never abolished”. “Since redemocratization, all governments have taken advantage of budget release to obtain parliamentary support. It is something quite questionable from an ethical point of view, but it is inescapable for any ruler”, he said.

Queiroz agrees, however, that this reality has become more explicit and challenging in recent years due to a process of empowerment and autonomy acquired by the Legislature. “The parliamentarians got used to having a growing volume of budget appropriations and they don’t want to lose that. The ideal would be to re-discuss the traditional governance model”, he said.

Carlos Melo, a professor at Insper, disagrees with the president’s intention to assume direct responsibility for political articulation. For him, the strategy leads to the loss of arbitration and the final instance, for those who complain about lack of attention, in addition to taking away from Lula the chance of blaming someone for the defeats. “There is a crisis in the adopted model and the simple direct and personal action of the president may even alleviate the problem, but it will not solve it”, he wrote in an article on the portal Headline.

For him, the ideal method for the government to seek a majority in Congress would be to start with big projects for the future. “With the legitimacy of the electoral victory and social mobilization, the parties would align. Small concessions here and there would shape the coalition. Unstable and reliant on compromises, most would be political and programmatic,” he explained. He recalled that there were several realistic arrangements that were integrated into the national political culture for decades.

The professor believes that Lula is being pressured by Parliament to adopt the model implemented in the Bolsonaro government, in which party leaders unite in blocs with dispersed interests to obtain resources that serve individual co-option. As a result, the individual amendment approved in the Budget has become a fundamental and relevant instrument for parliamentary action. And, in this arrangement, the Executive accommodates itself, becoming dependent on little transparent agreements established in Congress.

Government paralysis favors opposition rearticulation

The challenge faced by Lula becomes, however, more complex in view of Lira’s insistence on regularizing the rapid release of Budget resources, noting that positions in ministries are no longer sufficient to form a congressional base. An example that seems to confirm this thesis is the case of União Brasil, whose representation in three ministries did not convert into votes in favor of the government.

According to analysts, without guaranteed support in the plenary, the government ends up paralyzing and favoring the rearticulation of the right. Aware of this, the president of the Chamber has given spaces to the opposition, such as the command for positions in permanent commissions and the opening of CPIs.

Behind the scenes, there is also the impression that tensions between the government and Parliament tend to increase with the prospect of a dispute over limited resources, with Lula and the Civil House seeking to make public investments in infrastructure possible under a new Growth Acceleration Program (PAC).

Despite the public and veiled criticisms made by the mayor, Arthur Lira (PP-L), in relation to the political articulation of the government, the leader of the government in Congress, senator Randolfe Rodrigues (Rede-AP), denied that the president had considered change staff or methods. On May 8, the day before Lula’s meeting with parliamentary leaders, Rodrigues assured that ministers Alexandre Padilha (Institutional Relations) and Rui Costa (Casa Civil), as well as deputy José Guimarães (PT-CE) and senator Jaques Wagner (PT-BA), are “completely trusted” by the president.

Parliamentary advisers consulted by the People’s Gazette, point out that, with a program that focuses on social policies and adopts statist conceptions for the economy, it remains for the government to negotiate pragmatically with the center and center-right parties in order to advance on some points. Lula’s individual power alone is insufficient, and the lack of a broad consensual agenda of priorities makes it difficult to build sustainable governance. The first reflections of this have already been seen in votes and even in the impasse with provisional measures (MP) edited in the first days of the year. There is even a risk that centrist parliamentarians, in retaliation, change the MP that deals with the attributions of ministries commanded by politicians close to Lula.

Lula suggests ignoring reality and not having a strategy

Despite all the warnings and defeats, Lula seems to be unaware of the scenario in Congress and the resistance of broad sectors of society to his government plans. Analysts consider it a mistake for the president to summarize his difficulties in governing to parliamentary bargaining or the resistance of the independent Central Bank (BC), for example. In addition to the merely operational aspect, that of meeting the demands of parliamentarians, the correlations of political forces have changed a lot in the last 20 years.

In this sense, economist Elena Landau expressed surprise at the lack of skill with which Lula, one of the most experienced politicians in the country, is conducting the first months of his third presidential term.

Even having declared her vote for the PT in the second round of the elections, she highlighted a series of mistakes made by the president in an article published this Friday (12), in the newspaper The State of S. Paulo, which suggests the absence of a strategy. The list ranges from attacks on the Central Bank to criticism of “American imperialism”, passing through the change of the Sanitation Framework via decrees and the action filed in the Federal Supreme Court (STF) against Eletrobras.