Maia says Tarcísio was the favorite, but was hit “by Bolsonarista’s crazy agenda”

The former president of the Chamber of Deputies and now president of the National Confederation of Financial Institutions (CNF), Rodrigo Maia, stated this Thursday, the 16th, that the governor of São Paulo, Tarcísio de Freitas (Republicans), was the favorite candidate for the Presidency of the Republic, but was “contaminated by the crazy agenda of Bolsonarism”. According to Maia, whoever “sticks to the roots of Bolsonarism” will not be president of the country.

“Tarcísio, the favorite, contaminated by the crazy agenda of anti-Brazil Bolsonarism, by a group that was nationalist – an inconsistency in everything that is being done in relation to what was said in the past – turns the center-right candidate into the candidate to lose the election”, said Maia during lunch promoted by Grupo Voto in the capital of São Paulo.

Party leaders Baleia Rossi (MDB), Gilberto Kassab (PSD), Paulo Serra (PSDB) and Renata Abreu (Podemos) also participated.

Rodrigo Maia stated that President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT) has adopted a “more populist” line of action after a recent vote in Congress and after what he classified as “crazy movements” of Bolsonarism in the United States. According to him, the PT member began to defend issues with strong popular appeal, such as zero fares on public transport and the end of the so-called “6×1 scale”.

Maia compared the strategy to the behavior of former president Dilma Rousseff (PT) in 2014, when postponing economic adjustments until the following year, and assessed that the current government seems willing to follow the same path, prioritizing social discourses to the detriment of responsibility for public spending.

For him, Planalto has explored a “rich versus poor” narrative from which few politicians can extricate themselves, and which, according to him, alienates investors by treating them as a “problem” instead of “part of the solution”. Maia also criticized the possibility of Lula winning a fourth term.

“For the fourth term, there is only one politician, since I entered politics, that I have met, who has managed to reinvent himself and remain very popular: Eduardo Paes (PSD). None others”, stated the former president. “After the second to the third, everyone sank. And Lula was in a process of getting worse”, he said, considering that, despite this, Lula “is very competent, obvious, very experienced, very charismatic”.

Maia also pointed out the lack of coherence of the National Congress in carrying out the economic agenda. According to him, Parliament “does not help us see what the agenda is” that it intends to organize to provide security to the country, alternating speeches of austerity with votes that expand expenses and tax incentives.

The former president of the Chamber cited as an example the approval of the Permanent Sports Law, which extended tax benefits with the support of practically all parties, and the PEC for Community Agents, which, in his assessment, “hits home” the Social Security reform by reestablishing rules of integrality and parity considered “wrong and unnecessary”.

Maia also stated that, the previous week, he had to intervene to prevent the vote on a project that would increase the limits of MEI and Simples Nacional. He said he had warned the current president of the Chamber, Hugo Motta (Republicanos-PB), that the measure could double the fiscal cost and “bury the Public Pension for good”, since the simplified regime is, in his view, one of the main factors causing imbalance in the system.

For the former deputy, Congress, “historically identified as a center-right House”, has lost the ability to organize an alternative or opposition agenda that presents “consistent solutions”.