How to bring balance to relations between Brazil’s Executive and Legislative branches

The Executive branch is no longer the center of power in Brazilian politics. Although this shift started in 2015, it accelerated considerably during President Jair Bolsonaro’s tenure. 

If elected this year, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva will face the challenge of reestablishing the balance of power among the Executive and Legislative branches — an arduous task given the amount of power legislators have obtained with the so-called secret budget.

Political scientist Carlos Pereira has argued that such a task involves, first and foremost, changing the fact that individual and collective congressional budgetary grants became mandatory in 2015 and 2019, respectively. But his argument suffers from three limitations. 

First, it is internally inconsistent: it removes any of President Bolsonaro’s agency in creating the secret budget, to argue later that the solution resides solely in the agency of the next president in re-introducing non-mandatory congressional grants. 

Second, it incorrectly assesses the lay of the land as it misreads the long-term impacts of the secret budget on both the legislative arena and Executive-Legislative relations. 

Third, and related to both points, it proposes an inadequate solution to the power imbalance between the branches. 

How did congressional grants become mandatory?

The 2015 and 2019 budgetary reforms changed the landscape of relations between the Executive and Legislative branches. Congressional grants are small parts of the budget that lawmakers allocate to their constituencies by funding health or infrastructure projects, among other areas. 

These grants were designed to prevent the Executive branch from having exclusive control...