The answer to the question that gives the title to this column requires us to resume in the story. Those have been part of the functioning of our multiparty presidentialism since 1946, when we had the first elections with proportional representation with open list (RPA). RPLA in major electoral districts produces party fragmentation and the training of coalition governments. , former governor of Pernambuco, intuited its implications: “I know no better system for minority representation, no worse for the majority constitution” (1952).
On the other hand, the electoral survival of parliamentarians under the RPA involves the ability to attract benefits to their territorial bases. In return they offer political loyalty to the executive – a process that involves to a greater or lesser extent the mediation of party leaders and presidents of houses.
Hermes Lima, Getúlio’s minister, former Judge (revoked) of the STF, and also former minister in 1963, was a pioneer in the diagnosis of the coalition construction process: “The show of majorities made to the pieces, unstable, artificial and costly, that the presidents and governors are compelled to find in the chambers.” And pointed to “opportunistic combinations and dusts that exhaust political life in a continuous process of readjustments, commitments, impositions and complicity. What’s more, it speaks of the “disregard of all kinds” (1955).
Here we finally come to budget amendments: “It is no other reason that the budget amendments in the House present themselves to the thousands making it difficult, even making a reasonable planning of works and services in the anua law impossible.” And it completes: “Each deputy needs votes in the entire state and is judged to distribute, through the budget law, funds and aid throughout the state” (1955).
From 1988, the game described by Lima acquired another dynamic in which the protagonist became the president. The asymmetry in executive-legislative relations lasted by 2015. Gradually, it expanded its prerogatives, which led under Bolsonaro to a kind of hyperdelegation by the executive-now centered under the command of the presidents of the two houses-, which persisted with Lula. The news we now have is a bizarre pathology: the Supreme Court assuming functions of a kind of previous control – internal and external – of amendments.
Amendments in its current format are the symptom of a more general dysfunction in our presidentialism, which will probably not return to the balance of the previous strong president. The executive will only be protagonist again when he has more party powers (expanding his bench), there is greater congruence between the preferences of the Government Coalition and the Median Congress; when the ministries are allocated more proportionally to the base; In addition to favorable contextual factors regarding the economy, presidential popularity, government assessment, and less polarization.
Budget system reforms – reducing individualism in the formulation of amendments and increasing party and bench incentives – would only mitigate the problem.
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