The still president of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, has ordered the cancellation of the financing of parliamentary amendments, known as ‘secret budgets’, after his former partners in Congress reached agreements with the new head of state as of January 2023, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
Bolsonaro’s order leaves the president of the Chamber of Deputies, Arthur Lira, with no room for maneuver to finance the agreements he had reached with the different benches to confirm his reelection, and also puts Lula in a difficult situation since he criticized this type of amendments during the campaign.
The so-called ‘secret budgets’ are a mechanism approved in mid-2020 with which each year a parliamentarian acts as a «rapporteur» in the budget items to suggest to the federal ministries where and how to allocate it.
It is a highly questioned resource since it would violate the principles of transparency and impersonality required by any budget law and that since its approval has served Bolsonaro to maintain governability within a Congress full of clientelism.
In recent years these resources have been distributed without any technical criteria and have supplied local and regional entities allied to the Federal Government to pay for their policies or to buy goods unnecessarily, from tractors to garbage trucks at inflated prices.
Bolsonaro’s decision to cut these funds comes a day after the leadership of the Workers’ Party (PT) confirmed to Lira that it would bid for his reelection as head of the Presidency of the Chamber, while they are expected to do the same for the head of the Senate, Rodrigo Pacheco.
Both were elected with Bolsonaro’s endorsement and are in charge of managing the distribution of these budgets. Of the 16.5 billion reais (about 3 billion euros) set aside for this year’s items, 7.8 billion reais (1.4 billion euros) have been blocked by the government, the newspaper ‘Estadao’ has learned.
This latest maneuver by Bolsonaro took place this Wednesday, the same day that Lula met separately with Lira and Pacheco, arguing that those resources should go to other areas due to the blockages that the Government was forced to make in the last one to meet the debt ceiling.
