Brazil’s Supreme Court (STF) will today reopen lawsuits debating the constitutionality of the so-called secret budget, which allocates funds to projects set by parliamentarians without identifying them.
This analysis began last week with the reading of the report and presentations from those interested in the process. The rapporteur in the case is the President of the Court, Minister Rosa Weber.
The National Congress has filed a motion with the Supreme Court to dismiss the lawsuits against the secret budget.
According to the Republic’s Deputy Attorney General Lindôra Araújo, the Supreme Court cannot be used as a “political stage” and the secret budget cannot be blamed for the country’s problems.
“Brazil’s problems were not caused by the secret budget,” she said, recalling that the measures questioned the lack of transparency of the rapporteur’s amendments and that, in her opinion, Congress passed measures to limit the opacity of information on transfers remove.
Journalistic media assure that the secret budget has become a bargaining chip between the federal government and the national congress, since the rapporteur’s amendments do not have to be distributed evenly among the parliamentarians.
President-elect Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s political articulators race against time to clear the vote.
The STF score was five to four to bring down the mechanism when the trial was suspended last Thursday. The voices of Ministers Ricardo Lewandowski and Gilmar Mendes are still missing.
Since its approval, the mechanism has pushed defeated far-right President Jair Bolsonaro to maintain governance within Congress.
“The use of budget changes as a form of co-opting political support by the executive branch, in addition to violating the principle of equality to the extent that certain members of Congress are privileged at the expense of others, endangers the system itself, democratically,” Judge recently wrote Carmen Lúcia Antunes of the STF.
According to current rules, there is no limit on the value of these changes and it is not possible to identify the MP who requested the expenses.
Latin Press