Pension reform means things will improve. The only question is when

The São Paulo Stock Exchange returned to a surprise after the state holiday on Tuesday. The pension reform, approved only a week earlier by the Special Commission, would pass the first round of voting in the House already that Wednesday (10). At the end of that day, the House concluded: 379 votes in favor, 131 against, and only three abstentions.

As I already said, politics has its own pace. Often, the rate of proceedings is unforeseeable, being conditioned by various factors particular to the political game. This explains why there are so many surprises when expectations are low, and so many disappointments due to high expectations.

A good example is the timetable established by Rodrigo Maia. The House speaker intended (and succeeded) to put the basic text to a vote on Wednesday night, and then vote on the amendments as a whole in the early hours of the following morning. As soon as this latter process began, however, he suspended the session. The reason being that the quorum rapidly shrunk and federal congressmen were not sufficiently aligned to avoid eventual changes which would have evacuated a lot of the bill’s content.

In this context, the session was postponed until Thursday (11) at 9 am. Once again, it never got going—negotiations on the amendments took up the whole day and session only opened at...