In the 2022 presidential election, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva built a big tent coalition of 14 political parties. The immediate goal was to lead a front broad enough to unseat then-President Jair Bolsonaro, and, if he won, to have a solid enough base of support to govern.
Six months into his third term, Lula’s coalition-building strategy has proven more difficult than ever. Much heralded as a political genius in the past, the president has seen his government being denied by Congress time and again.
The Senate approved at the eleventh hour a provisional decree signed by Lula on January 1 to configure his cabinet. The vote came only after the government opened the purse strings, approving a single-day record amount of money for budgetary grants, which allow lawmakers to sponsor projects of their choosing.
The vote took place Thursday afternoon, just hours before the decree was set to expire. The stakes were high. If the decree was not approved by Congress, Lula’s government would be forced to adopt the same configuration of Jair Bolsonaro’s cabinet. Ministries would close and federal agencies would change places.
It wasn’t a victory for the government, per se, as a congressional committee had modified Lula’s intended cabinet configuration. In fact, the administration had to settle for the bad in order to avoid the worse.
In Brazil, the sitting president needs congressional approval to create or scrap cabinet ministries — and does so by means of provisional decrees, instruments that take immediate effect but expire after 120 days if not confirmed by lawmakers. Historically, Congress has mostly rubber-stamped decrees on the cabinet’s configuration.
All proposed legislation in Brazil is assigned to a rapporteur, a lawmaker in charge of drafting the final text. Lawmakers usually vote on reports, and not...
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