The Centrao has already won
In Brasilia, political officials already know who the winner of the October elections will be. It will be neither Lula's left alliance with the center-right expressed through the link with former São Paulo governor Geraldo Alckmin, nor the far-right populist proposal of Jair Bolsonaro. The winner of the elections in Brazil will be the influential group of deputies and senators known as Centrão.
The Centrão is the bloc of conservative parties that has dominated Brazilian politics since the return to democracy in 1989. That bloc has been the hinge of the Brazilian political system, supporting all the Presidents of the young Brazilian democracy - both those on the left and on the right.
It is not a formal bloc, with a program, but acts within Congress by changing parliamentary support for spaces in the management of the government and in the budget of the nation.
Whether Lula or Bolsonaro is the winner of the presidential elections (there is a 70% chance of Lula's victory), the Centrão will continue to shuffle the cards in Congress and will have a seat in Ministries and public companies in 2023. The Centrão currently holds 69% of the seats in the Chamber of Deputies and it won 56% of the seats in 2018 during the last elections for the state legislatures. In 2020, it obtained 70% of the councilors and mayors in the municipal elections.
Their ideology is that of power and pragmatism. That is not a moral judgment, but a reality check. The strength of the Centrão lies precisely in the fact that its ideological plasticity allows it to be in line with any government.
The current President of the Chamber of Deputies, Arthur Lira, a reference for the Centrão, and a strategic ally of Bolsonaro, referred to the bloc as the "moderating force." According to Lira, the Centrão is a type of referee for Brazilian politics.
Lira's party is called Progressistas but ironically its genealogy refers to the 70s, to the National Renewal Alliance (ARENA): the political party created by the military dictatorship to provide civilian support. The Progressistas acted with the governments of Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff, members of the Workers' Party (PT), placing managers in Petrobras, Brazil's key state-owned company.
It is impossible to govern Brazil without the support of federal deputies and senators from the multiple parties that make up the Centrão as a result of a hyper fragmented party system. Today, there are 23 parties with parliamentary representation, so the formation of majorities becomes extremely difficult. The largest party in Congress currently is President Bolsonaro's Liberal Party, (party names have little importance), which holds 15% of the seats in the Chamber of Deputies.
The president of the Chamber of Deputies, Arthur Lira.
During Lula da Silva's first presidential election in 2002, the vice-president was from the Liberal Party itself - at that time, the mega textile entrepreneur José Alencar. The PL had party members in public companies during the PT government precisely because, as I said before, the ideology that guides is power and access to the State.
The Centrão solves the problem of the formation of legislative majorities with a simple formula: it guarantees political stability and avoids impeachment in exchange for space in the government bureaucracy and access to public resources.
A clear example of this took place in 2021, during negotiations for the nation's budget. The drafter of the bill, Senator Marcio Bittar, from the Amazonian state of Acre, created a novel item in which he personally went on to distribute R$ 3 billion (U$ 550 million) of the budget in an absolutely discretionary manner.
According to Brazilian law, deputies and senators are each entitled to a ceiling of R$ 8 million to choose projects that must receive money from the budget, with the exception that there are a series of rules that the elected projects must follow.
The innovation by Senator Bittar, who is a close ally of Bolsonaro - was to create a fund in the budget that was free from the oversight of the controlling bodies. The mechanism created was so opaque that journalists with O Estado de São Paulo newspaper, who discovered the case, named it the "secret budget." The Supreme Court ruled that Congress should disclose such information, which has not happened to date.
Public funds from the federal budget distributed by Senator Bittar, in cooperation with the President of the Chamber of Deputies Arthur Lira, is the way to finance the electoral campaign of his political groups and the parties of the Centrão in 2022. The deputies and senators who vote in favor of the government will have access to large resources of the budget to transfer to their electoral bases.
These resources are transferred, for example, to municipalities where the mayor is a relative of the deputy or used to buy tractors for cooperatives in rural areas or other resources. In short, politicians who have mandates manage to compete with many bodies of advantage compared to their adversaries.
Senator Marcio Bittar.
The control that Centrão exercises over state resources comes in exchange for not disturbing Bolsonaro in the face of his repeated conspiracy theories about electoral fraud and will allow this bloc to remain hegemonic in Congress in 2023.
The Centrão has some Latin American references. In Colombia, "mermelada" is the exchange of perks for political support. The parties that are part of the Centrão take over the State and present themselves to society as the providers of public goods, resembling the Colorados of Paraguay or the old PRI, in Mexico.
There are also similarities with Argentina, where social organizations have an impact precisely because they offer resources that the State does not provide, and what is not an assured right, becomes a political bnefit. The Centrão also operates under this logic.