The Chamber currently registers deputies with 82 different professions, from numerous lawyers to psychoanalysts, musicians, veterinarians and parachutists. There is no record of any mathematician, but in the next 30 days what will be heard most in the corridors of the Legislature is parliamentarians doing the math.
The window for deputies to change parties without risk of losing their mandate opened this Thursday (5) and runs until April 4, the deadline for those who wish to be affiliated with a political party.
The period is marked by intense behind-the-scenes movements, with the expectation that at least 10% of Congress will change parties. Such a flow will lead the Legislature to act at a slow pace in the coming days: the Chamber decided to have three weeks completely remote until then, and the session is already at a slower pace since returning from recess, with senators dedicated to the campaign.
The choice is based on regional issues, such as being in the party of the strongest candidate for government or a , and also national, with the significant migration of parliamentarians from the center to the , seeking to join their name with that of the Bolsonaro family.
The period is also one of accommodation in the Senate, with migrations to better project itself politically in the state or find space for a majority candidacy. Unable to run for , for example, senator Efraim Filho goes to the PL to run for the Government of Paraíba, and senator Alan Rick joined the PL to run for the Government of Acre.
Throughout the legislature, there was a slow and steady migration even before the window opened, with almost 10% of deputies changing their acronym. The Republicans of the president of the Chamber, Hugo Motta (PB), grew the most, with a balance of eight deputies in relation to the number of those elected in 2022.
PSD, with five more, and PP, with three more, also strengthened, while Bolsonaro’s PL registers 12 fewer parliamentarians than at the beginning of the legislature, with departures for both centrão and Novo, considered more to the right and with more space for majority candidacies.
For political scientist Murilo Medeiros, who surveyed the exchanges before the window, the reforms with the performance clause and the end of proportional coalitions led to the strengthening of the largest parties. “Parliamentarians began to migrate in a more concentrated and legally secure way, especially towards larger parties, capable of offering better electoral conditions”, he says.
Among party leaders, the expectation in this window is for the growth of parties such as PSD, and Republicans in this party window, and the decline of acronyms such as , and União Brasil.
More than ideology, the membership deadline is also time to do the math. Assembling the proportional ticket requires intricate mathematics regarding the number of votes expected for each candidate, the total that the ticket will have and how many seats it will be entitled to with these votes – the electoral quotient.
Over coffee in the plenary, discussions about numbers run wild. A deputy currently in the PDT says he is pressured by another left-wing party to join, but that the numbers make the choice difficult. If he continues where he is, he would probably be the most voted on the ticket. If it migrates, it would drop to fourth and run the risk of being left without a mandate if the party does not reach the projected number of seats.
Another deputy, from Paraíba, reported to his colleagues while following the news about the trials of two former mayors at the TSE (Superior Electoral Court). The former managers were convicted by the first instance of the Electoral Court and, if they do not reverse the conviction, the ticket will not have enough votes to create a seat. In this case, he says, it will be necessary to look – quickly – for another acronym.
However, it is not always enough to do the math. The PL directory in Minas Gerais intends to elect 20 federal deputies (double the current bench) thanks to the deputy’s re-election candidacy. In the last election, the party lost deputies due to a lack of candidates with at least 10% of the votes in the electoral quotient to be able to occupy the seats taken up by the newcomer.
The expectation that he would reach a record vote raised him and take advantage of this ride to reach the Chamber, but he decided to impose a filter on affiliations: he wants people politically identified with the right, who are running a presidential campaign for Flávio Bolsonaro and opposition to President Lula (PT). As a result, it blocked politicians from more of the center who wanted to join.
Secretary-general of the PL in Minas Gerais, deputy Zé Vitor says there is no veto, but a filter. “We are proposing that entry is not automatic. We will talk beforehand and we want everyone who enters to make it clear that they will be part of a larger project”, he says.
Among parliamentarians from other parties, who intended to migrate to the PL, the veto of outside politicians is part of Nikolas’ strategy to create his own group within the party. At least two federal deputies with a mandate are on the party’s list of restrictions.
Another point that weighs on the negotiations is the value of the electoral fund that each parliamentarian will receive for their campaign. Parties with more public money, such as the União Brasil federation and PP, seek to use the resources as an attraction for campaigns, to strengthen their tickets to Congress.
The argument is that acronyms with presidential aspirations, such as PT and PL, end up sharing resources with expensive majority campaigns, which means there is less money left to invest in other disputes. The president of a small party told Sheet that there are unrealistic proposals being made, with acronyms promising to transfer the spending ceiling for re-election campaigns from the electoral fund, as a way of gaining weight in Congress with memberships in the window.
