Arthur Lira, the Congressional Politician Who Thinks He Is the Prime Minister
Graziella Testa holds a PhD in Political Science from USP and is a professor at the School of Public Policy and Government at Fundação Getulio Vargas. She has been a visiting scholar at Universidad Nacional de San Martín and at Harvard University. She is a contributor to the Konrad Adenauer Foundation and a member of Legis-Ativo / Estadão, where she also hosts a podcast about the legislative branch of government. She is a columnist for the magazine Revista Problemas Brasileiros and Agência Estado and a political risk consultant to the financial and retail sectors. She researches Brazilian politics, focusing on legislative studies and informal institutions. This text was originally written for issue 72 of the WBO Newsletter, published on June 23, 2023. Fill in the form at the bottom of the text to access and subscribe to the WBO weekly newsletter in English.
The contradictory signs of the first six months of President Lula's third term can confuse anyone who proposes to analyze Brazilian politics. After calmly approving an issue as relevant as the fiscal framework, President Lula struggled to pass simple legislation such as the reorganization of the number of ministries in his cabinet. In this article, we address the institutional design of Brazilian presidentialism and the changes that the relationship between the executive and legislative has undergone in the last five years in Brazil. We argue that shallower analyzes have focused on the strengthening of the legislative over the executive, but Lula's biggest challenge is not the strength of Congress but the degree of centralization of power in the hands of the president of the Chamber of Deputies, the lower house of the Congress.
Building governability is never an easy task for minority governments, but in multiparty systems this challenge is even greater. The Brazilian presidential model is different from the American one because scholars associate it with the proportional electoral system, which generates the need for the governments in power to include several parties. More than that, the number of political parties in Brazil has increased gradually since the beginning of the New Republic in 1988, reaching 30 parties in 2018. This means that the elected president needs to make alliances with other parties, including some that were opponents during the election campaign. There are still two characteristics that interfere with this governability: the first is the presence of political parties from the so-called centrão (big center) with little attachment to ideological positions and more concerned with obtaining resources for their electoral constituencies. The second is the constitutional format and the practice of adding public policies measures to the constitution, which means that everyday decisions need higher percentages of the total number of members of the House and Senate to be approved.
Recently, the subject of the supposed strengthening of legislative power over the executive has appeared in different journalistic vehicles and has become almost common sense. From conjunctural analyzes that credit the phenomenon to Arthur Lira, the president of the Chamber of Deputies, to more exaggerated and definitive interpretations that speak of a “de facto semi-presidentialism.” The fallacy in these analyses is that the executive increasingly loses power to the legislative branch and depends on it to govern. Our argument is that the strengthening of the legislature was a consequence of the profile of President Jair Bolsonaro, who had no ambition to develop and execute public policy. On the other hand, the centralization of the work of the legislative branch is a reality that hinders the relationship between the executive and the legislative.
“The strengthening of the legislature was a consequence of the profile of President Jair Bolsonaro, who had no ambition to develop and execute public policy”
A first point that needs to be made is that the legislature has always had central importance in the formation of different governments and the design of public policies in Brazil. Since the enactment of the 1988 Constitution, the Congress has played an inescapable role for those elected to the executive, even though establishing a political agenda has shifted to the president of the republic, who initiates most of the legislation approved in the House. In political science literature, it is not new that the legislature has relevant weight and political parties are fundamental in the construction of the coalition, that is, parties that choose to compose the base of the government and share with the head of government the prioritization of issues and implementation of public policies. The legislature even uses the formal prerogatives of the president's agenda, such as the power of a presidential decree, to approve its own agenda. None of these phenomena is new or can be credited to any president of the Chamber of Deputies or the president of the republic.
There have been, however, some relevant changes in the relationship between the executive and the legislative in the last five years. The first that needs to be highlighted was the performance of the Congress during social distancing as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. On the one hand, the legislature assumed a prominent role and autonomy to respond to the numerous challenges posed by the pandemic and an inert and denialist executive under President Jair Bolsonaro. The second change was the centralization of work in Congress. During social distancing, the legislature was reduced to holding general sessions, without the functioning of the committees and other bodies, which are the main spaces for including the demands of congressional members and civil society. Therefore, two processes took place in a parallel manner: on the one hand, the legislative occupies a vacuum of power left by the executive and, on the other, the functioning of the legislative bodies is centralized in general sessions and, therefore, in the hands of the president of the two chambers of the congress.
Lula's election upset that balance. Lula’s more “policy-oriented” profile clashed with the tremendous powers enjoyed by Arthur Lira, re-elected president of the Chamber of Deputies and a former supporter of Jair Bolsonaro. At the same time, the main tool used by Bolsonaro to build a coalition, the so-called “secret budget,” in which resources were distributed to politicians without any accountability, was ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in January 2023. Lula seeks to build his coalition through party leaders rather than through the president of the Chamber of Deputies. To do so, he has two tools: sharing ministerial positions with parties that are ideologically distant from the Workers' Party or distributing earmarked parliamentary amendments to the budget in order to build ad hoc majorities in specific cases. Both remedies are bitter and will certainly result in a loss of popularity, in addition to the resistance of Arthur Lira. It is not clear which path Lula will take or which unlikely allies he will embrace. What we do know is that governance depends on democratic stability, the most precious asset we can aspire to.
