By JALDES MENESES*
The Lula 3 government maintained a precarious balance until 2025, with fits and starts and the cost of an electoral defeat in 2024, giving up prime spaces in the executive apparatus and the 51 billion share of parliamentary amendments in the budget to preserve a mitigated governability.
1.
The main political consequence of the 2013 mobilizations was the para-legal consolidation of an informal semi-parliamentarism. This phenomenon developed against the backdrop of consecutive electoral victories by the Centrão – not only in national disputes, but also in state and municipal elections – combined with changes in electoral rules.
The political and electoral strength and power structures of the Centrão parties, which were already powerful, have only grown since 2013. Although it is now manifesting itself with greater intensity, this process did not originate in the current Lula government, but dates back at least to the government of Jair Bolsonaro, who negotiated with the Centrão to contain the impeachment due to accusations of genocide during the pandemic – remember the 45 cases filed by Arthur Lira.
The political crisis under Lula's third term, although with its own characteristics, has its institutional roots in this previous process. There is a marked discontinuity in relation to Lula's first two terms (2003-2010). It is fundamentally a political crisis – not an economic or fiscal one –, although the emphasis on the fiscal agenda reveals the hegemony of rentierism in the bloc of the ruling classes.
Since the regency period and the crisis of Dom Pedro II's coming of age, Brazilian political forms have presented singularities. Here, a historical dialectic of repetition, resulting from the resistance of fundamental social structures, and the paradoxical sensation of a permanent critical situation coexist.
From this paradox between low transformative intensity and high tragic temperature of everyday politics derives a peculiar phenomenon: in the Brazilian sociopolitical domain, so-called “anomalous” institutional processes and arrangements proliferate, refractory to the classic models of political liberalism.
Since at least 2013, all federal governments – Dilma II, Michel Temer, Jair Bolsonaro and Lula III –, which would be a kind of “cycle” in terms of political duration, have expressed moments of an organic crisis of the Brazilian State. What “organic crisis” would this be? For me, a crisis of the political regime consolidated in the 1988 Constitution.
The so-called “Citizen Constitution” allowed, mainly during the dispute between PT and PSDB, a kind of liberal-democratic pact, operated by “coalition presidentialism”, allowing the precarious construction, against the dominant neoliberalism, of a Social State that operates on the edge of “discomfort”, and which I call a late peripheral-dependent Welfare State, an early constellation of the old Developmental State of 1930 (a long cycle of implementation of Fordism in Brazil), which entered into debacle at the end of the dictatorship and which remains under attack to this day.
2.
Antonio Gramsci, us prison notebooks (especially in Notebook 13), developed the concept of organic crisis when analyzing situations of power and party structure in critical periods. Overcoming economistic readings of the 1929 crisis, Antonio Gramsci highlighted the relative autonomy of politics. Modern parliamentarism always contains Caesarist elements, which are amplified in crises. The reconstitution of the Centrão was not accidental, but the result of strategic planning.
The 2015 electoral reforms under Eduardo Cunha reduced the campaign period from 90 to 45 days and changed the distribution of media time. The Supreme Federal Court, in turn, restricted financing to individuals (limited to 10% of declared income) and to party funds. These changes, together with the end of proportional coalitions and the barrier clause (PEC 2017), were consolidated in subsequent elections, strengthening traditional political forces.
Rodrigo Maia maintained this mechanism to support Michel Temer. With Arthur Lira as Speaker of the Chamber of Deputies (2021-2024), the majority parliamentary bloc reached its peak. Resolution 84/19, by limiting obstructions and speeding up procedures, reduced opposition instruments. Bolsonaro, after the failure of the attempt to create a parliamentary base focused on the “thematic benches” (Bible, beef and bullets), instead of the parties (a right-wing residue of the “anti-politics” common sense created in 2013 and repeated in Lava-Jato) ceded budgetary control to Arthur Lira, creating especially the “secret budget” and the “Pix amendments”.
This informal semi-parliamentarism constituted in fact a neoliberal Caesarism, piloted successively by Arthur Lira and Hugo Motta. Alternatively described as a “deputadocracy” or a parliament of “513 autonomous entrepreneurs”, this regime requires, in the words of the Marquis de Sade, someone, a parliamentarian (Caesarist) president among his peers, a head who stands up higher than the other members of the parliamentary herd, to “bring order to the orgy”.
The Lula 3 government maintained a precarious balance until 2025, with fits and starts and the cost of an electoral defeat in 2024, giving up prime spaces in the executive apparatus and the 51 billion share of parliamentary amendments in the budget to preserve mitigated governability.
The rupture of this fragile agreement, whose “tip of the iceberg” was the IOF issue (as highlighted in the editorial Folha de S. Paul on 1/7/25, whose content I disagree with, but agree with the obvious metaphor of the title), demands from the government at least three linked movements to regain strength and be competitive in next year's elections: regain majority social support, inform the population about the injustices of the Brazilian tax system and expand its narrative on social networks, which can be assets for a return of street mobilizations.
In other words, and here I end this short article, to carry out the “great politics” of strong ideas and social projects and not just the “small politics” of cold negotiation and conciliation.
*Jaldes Meneses is a full professor in the History Department of the Federal University of Paraíba (UFPB).
the earth is round there is thanks to our readers and supporters.
Help us keep this idea going.
CONTRIBUTE
