Dec 23 2022 | Nº. 46

Editorial

The Lula Administration Takes Shape in Bolsonaro's Last Days

With just over a week to go before taking office, President-Elect Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva fleshed out his incoming cabinet this week. Even though there are still important ministerial roles yet to be announced—for example, pertaining to the environment—Lula’s administration is shaping up to be unabashedly progressive across the board. Indeed, there have been some grumblings in critical media outlets that the cabinet does not reflect the broad front that helped Lula defeat Bolsonaro in the first place. Furthermore, while the cabinet announced so far represents a massive step forward in terms of gender and racial diversity compared to the post-2016 administrations of Michel Temer and Jair Bolsonaro, there have been some missed opportunities for Lula to include more women in the cabinet. 

For example, Ceará governor Izolda Cela had long been the reported frontrunner for the role of education minister. Over the past decade, Cela’s state has presided over remarkable improvements in elementary education despite being relatively poor. Cela, a former schoolteacher and education policy expert, was seen as a no-brainer for the critical position of overseeing Brazilian education as the country is still dealing with the pernicious aftereffects of COVID-19, which kept many young Brazilians without economic resources from accessing basic education during a critical time in their development. Instead, however, Lula chose former Ceará governor Camilo Santana seemingly at the last minute. There were many reasons for this. For one thing, Santana is a longtime member of Lula’s Workers’ Party (PT). The PT has claimed many of the most important positions in the cabinet. Many outlets have criticized Lula for favoring his party when it comes to nominations, but this seems an odd complaint given that Lula won an election as the face of a party with a proven track record of success across a broad range of policy. Santana is close with Cela, who will instead work under him overseeing primary education. While this was a disappointment for some, the cabinet on the whole brings Brazil’s federal government into a much more clearly representative place than it was under Bolsonaro’s profoundly reactionary vision. There are several prominent women in key positions with over a dozen, including a likely role for Senator Simone Tebet, yet to be announced. 

As time runs out on Bolsonaro’s term, domestic and international attention has mostly transitioned away from the incumbent. Several figures in the current administration resigned early, seemingly recognizing that the room to maneuver and get anything done in the current climate is remote. Meanwhile, plans for Lula’s inauguration continue to take shape. It was announced the U.S. Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, the first Native American to hold that position and who was a particularly vocal Bolsonaro critic during her time in Congress, will represent the Biden administration in Brasília during Lula’s swearing-in ceremony. Hotels in Brazil’s capital are also expected to be at full capacity over the January 1 weekend, signaling broad-based enthusiasm for Lula’s inauguration.

Lula will enter office with global goodwill. He also will begin his term having secured a major congressional victory before even taking office with the Supreme Court declaring unconstitutional the so-called secret budget that gave tremendous bargaining power to the speaker of the lower house of Congress. The secret budget, a pillar of policymaking during the Bolsonaro years, had forced Lula into a diminished position while negotiating crucial welfare policies with Congress. Now, he will be able to keep an important campaign promise of extending more robust government payments to the neediest Brazilians as a matter of course. The early signs are promising for observers in Brazil and abroad interested in a more progressive orientation for Latin America’s largest nation. 

Highlights

• LULA'S CABINET. President-elect Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva announced sixteen more ministers for the future government on Thursday, December 22. Among them are Vice-president-elect Geraldo Alckmin (Brazilian Socialist Party), who will be the Minister of Industry and Commerce. Other new appointees are Alexandre Padilha as Minister of Institutional Relations, Márcio Macêdo as Chief of Staff of the General Secretariat of the Presidency, Jorge Messias as the Attorney General, Nísia Trindade as Minister of Health, Camilo Santana as Minister of Education, Esther Dweck as Minister of Public Administration, Márcio França as Minister of Ports and Airports, Luciana Santos as Minister of Science and Technology, Cida Gonçalves as Minister of Women, Wellington Dias as Minister of Social Development, Margareth Menezes as Minister of Culture, Luiz Marinho as Minister of Labor, Anielle Franco as Minister for Racial Equality, Silvio Almeida as Minister for Human Rights, and Vinícius Marques de Carvalho as the head of the Office of the Controller General.

• FINAL REPORT OF THE GOVERNMENT TRANSITION OFFICE. Lula da Silva’s transition team also presented on Thursday, December 22 the Final Report of the Government Transition Office. Vice-president-elect Geraldo Alckmin led the team and remarked on the alarming scenario left by Bolsonaro's government shown in the report. According to the Report, it denied 26 percent of requests for access to information. Furthermore, it documented that deforestation in Brazil increased by 49 percent from 2019 to 2022 and that Bolsonaro reduced crop production by 90 percent. The report also shows that in the last three years, the number of children who cannot read and interpret texts has grown from 50 to 70 percent, the worst result in 10 years. Bolsonaro also reduced the Ministry of Culture's budget by 85 percent and the number of civil servants by 66 percent during the four years of his administration. Regarding health, the vice president-elect criticized how Bolsonaro's government handled the Covid-19 pandemic. He recalled that Brazil recorded 11 percent of all deaths from Covid-19 in the world, placing it as the second country with the highest number of victims. He also said 34 million citizens still have not received any vaccine against Covid-19.

• WITHDRAWAL. The future Minister of Justice, Flávio Dino (Brazilian Socialist Party), announced on Wednesday, December 21 the cancellation of the appointment of Edmar Camata as director general of the Federal Highway Police. This decision followed the repercussion of news reports that he had published his support for Operation Car Wash (Lava Jato) on social media and praised the former prosecutor Deltan Dallagnol, who headed the task force in Curitiba and former judge Sérgio Moro, who sentence President-elect Lula da Silva to time in prison. In making the decision, Dino stated that he understood that “it would be more appropriate to proceed with a replacement.”

• TRANSITION CONSTITUTIONAL BILL APPROVED. Late on Wednesday, December 21, Brazil's Congress approved a constitutional amendment to increase the government spending cap in order to maintain welfare payouts to low-income families. This centerpiece campaign pledge by the country's incoming president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is set to raise Brazil's spending ceiling by 145 billion reais (US$28 billion) for one year. The budgetary authorization will fund monthly payments of 600 reais (US$120) under the Bolsa Familia welfare program. Incoming Finance Minister Fernando Haddad told reporters that the comfortable victory in the lower house was a good test of the future government's political support in Congress.

Feature Article

The Relationship between Politicians and Bureaucrats during the Bolsonaro Government: Authoritarian Management and the Reaction of Civil Servants

By: Gabriela Spanghero Lotta, Michelle Fernandez, João Paschoal Pedote, Olívia Landi Corrales Guaranha, Mariana Costa Silveira, Iana Alves de Lima

Bureaucracy and democracy are concepts that go hand in hand. The construction of modern states is directly associated with the establishment of a bureaucratic administration guided by universal and impersonal rules and with the composition of a stable cadres of officials selected for their technical knowledge. It is in this sense, therefore, that bureaucracies establish themselves as safeguards of democratic institutions.

It is from this point of view that, in contexts of a democratic regression, such as what has occurred in Brazil in recent years, a new dimension of conflicts between politicians and bureaucrats can be observed, which is established outside the normality of democratic institutions. Bolsonarism presented a project to deconstruct the democratic social welfare state that had been foreseen by the Federal Constitution of 1988. To this end, it adopted different practices as a strategy of oppressive control of and attacks on public servants. As a result, the federal public bureaucracy began to play an active role in defending the preservation of institutions, public policies, and order within the democratic state through the establishment of practices in reaction to attempts at control and curtailment that were employed by governing politicians.

After conducting interviews with nearly 200 civil servants from different areas of the Brazilian federal government during 2021 and 2022, we identified a relational dynamic between the oppressive practices employed by politicians and the reactions presented by bureaucrats. We evidenced the establishment of a feedback and learning dynamic between both groups. We found oppressive practices (carried out by politicians) and bureaucratic reactions of different types, which were classified according to two dimensions: (i) their nature: formal or informal and (ii) their scale: individual or collective.

The oppression of politicians in relation to the bureaucracy differs insofar as it is based (or not based) on normative acts or formalized in official processes of the organization in question. To the same extent, oppressive practices can occur on an individual or collective basis. Individual oppression is that which directly affects the individual working in a bureaucracy with the goal of either molding the person or forcing him or her out of their position. In oppression directed at a group of people, the object is to target career civil servants, for example, who work in the same organization or in managing the same public policy, or generically against the government bureaucracy as a whole and in a different way.

With regard to the role of the bureaucracy, formal reaction strategies are those that are organized around institutional options, such as seeking out the judiciary to solve conflicts, while informal strategies are those organized “under the radar,” which may even materialize in acts of sabotage against the current government. On the other hand, the individual reaction is carried out by a single public servant, such as voicing a disagreement or refusing to sign documents with which one does not agree. Collective reactions can be organized by public servant from the same government body or in a specific career, who, for example, plan and coordinate strategies. Both the nature and scale of reactions depend to an extent on the nature and scale of oppressive practices, which are also molded over time based on relational experiences that are learned as a result of bureaucrats' responses.

Table 1 summarizes the typology we found. Despite being presented in different quadrants, the strategies coexist in the day-to-day experiences of people working in public administration.

Table 1. Typology of oppressions and reactions according to means/mechanisms and scale.

Source: Lotta et al (2022).

Although the control of public servants and the redirection of practices are part of the democratic governance and changes in governments, we draw attention to the obvious abnormality that the Brazil federal bureaucracy experienced between 2019 and 2022. The process of building a stable and qualified bureaucracy, in addition to building a relationship of respect and appreciation for these public servants, must be priorities in order to guarantee the delivery of services to citizens, the promotion of the fight against inequalities, and, ultimately, the strengthening of Brazilian democracy.

Gabriela Spanghero Lotta holds a PhD in political science from the University of São Paulo (USP) and is professor of public administration at Getúlio Vargas Foundation (FGV/EAESP).

Michelle Fernandez holds a PhD in political science from the University of Salamanca and is a researcher at the Institute of Political Science/University of Brasília.

João Paschoal Pedote is a Master's student in public administration and government at FGV/EAESP.

Olívia Landi Corrales Guaranha holds a Master's degree in public administration and government from FGV/EAESP.

Mariana Costa Silveira is a doctoral student in public administration and government at FGV/ EAESP with a Master’s degree in political science from USP.

Iana Alves de Lima is a doctoral candidate in public administration and government and a professor at FGV/EAESP.

Feature articles express the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the editors or WBO.