In February, senator Efraim Filho, from União Brasil, a party that is one of the exponents of the centrão, the group of around 150 deputies who are openly and proudly opportunists, was fierce in defending budgetary containment, cutting expenses, responsibility in public spending, by taking on a parliamentary committee dedicated to the topic.
“We have to understand that the fashion expression is budget balance,” said Efraim. For the senator, this had to be the premise of the commission to avoid “unrestrained spending” that would cause “an impact on society”.
In June, Hugo Motta, the president of the Chamber of Deputies, who is from the Republicans, another exponent of the centrão, reinforced that mantra. “The Lula government must do its homework and cut spending, the executive cannot spend without restraint”, he stated with a deep voice and a vigilant eye.
It’s the old armchair: the left tends to spend on social programs, supposedly to reduce inequality, the right prefers to privilege orderly public accounts, allegedly in the name of responsibility. As no one is completely right or completely wrong, it is there, in the tenuous gap between the two historical positions, that Brazil is managed.
But now we are no longer in February, nor in June, but in October, when the countdown to the general elections in exactly one year from now officially begins.
And when we talk about elections, we talk about campaigns. Now, the parties in Brazil, many of them run as family businesses, in which the president’s son succeeds his father, the grandson succeeds his son and so on, already have a generous public fund, popularly called “fundão”, of 1.4 billion reais – around 230 million euros – to spend on airtime, posters and the like.
However, with the favorable vote of União Brasil, of the strict senator Efraim, and of the Republicans, of the austere deputy Motta, parliament approved this week a reserve of another 4.9 billion reais – around 800 million euros – to add to that already fat fund. It is, therefore, around a billion euros for airtime, posters and the like.
In other words, for social programs to combat pornographic Brazilian inequality, “budget restraint” should be applied. For the essential and deteriorated Education and Health, areas for which Michel Temer’s government, with the support of the aforementioned center, even established a spending ceiling in 2017, “unrestrained spending” should be avoided.
But for the congressmen to work for re-election, it is already justified to create a fund of more than a billion euros in a big, American campaign, as if spending more on airtime, posters and the like were synonymous with electing better representatives of the citizens.
And to think that the ban, decided by the Supreme Court in 2015, on campaign financing by private companies served to moralize politics…
Journalist, correspondent in São Paulo