From this Thursday (5) until the last working day (Friday, December 20) before the recess, you have 12 days to examine, debate, make adjustments and vote on the Budget Guidelines Law, the 2025 Budget and the regulation of .
This is just talking about the very urgent needs of the economic agenda of interest to the government. A drowning from which nothing good can be expected, but it is done.
It could have been different. The problem is that a lot of time was wasted throughout the year in which legislative activities were suspended due to electoral campaigns to which deputies and senators were only supposed to dedicate the extended weekend from Friday to Monday.
It wasn’t just that. There was a waste of energy and attention with nonsense of customs, with friction involving the Judiciary, with the permeation of blackmail, with political barbershops from Planalto and, finally, with the president’s (in)decision-making process in relation to spending cuts.
It’s been a while since ministers started talking about cost containment studies. Therefore, it is assumed that they were developing the measures since then, well before the municipal elections after which, according to them, the announcement would take place.
More than a month passed before the country finally learned what the government understood as the necessary adjustment to balance its accounts, and then we were already in December.
Package designed to meet both the dictates of and the convenience of politics, it was therefore received with a high degree of distrust. There are a number of projects of various formats and proposals for constitutional amendments that reach Congress in a trickle without a clear understanding of them.
If people who specialize in numbers have not yet fully understood what are empty promises and mere intentions in order to separate them from actually consequential decisions, what will they say about the understanding to be reached by a collegiate of 513 deputies and 81 senators who in most of them are not from the industry.
To repeat: there are 12 days minus weekends and considering the dubious five-day week.
Even if there was exclusive dedication to an “intensive” to give them familiarity with the ways and means of the economy, this would imply leaving aside the Budget and the regulation of tax reform. Also complex themes.
A solution to correct the delay in shared responsibility between the Executive and Legislative branches would be the extraordinary convening of Congress in January, at the initiative of one of the two branches of government. It was common practice in the past, it is no longer.
Working during recess is out of the question. After all, their highnesses must be very tired after the exhausting electoral journey which, although municipal, has an impact on their respective political survivals in 2026.
The process of building unanimity for the succession in the presidencies of the Chamber and the Council must also have been exhausting. It takes place in February 2025, but the architecture of internal interests occupied all of 2024.
Therefore, it is most likely that the so-called concentrated effort will be resorted to in botched votes. In them, deadlines are valued over content.
What’s more: a high-octane environment is where tortoises tend to breed, little animals that don’t climb trees except through floods or human hands.
Here what we will see will be haste being very friendly to imperfection, the effect of which — to remain in the field of sayings — is the risk of the country eating this meal all raw and very hot.
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