Brazil will push ahead with its ambitious economic reform programme following the approval last week of landmark pension changes, Rodrigo Maia, speaker of the lower house of Congress, told the Financial Times.
“We are in by far the most difficult recovery from any recession since the 1980s,” Mr Maia said during an interview in London. “The pension reform was a great result but the next steps will be key.”
The first priority will be an overhaul of Brazil’s bloated public sector, followed by tax reform. He said there was enough support in Congress for the first package to secure approval as early as March next year.
“The Brazilian people see the state as too expensive, too authoritarian and benefiting too few people,” he said. “It is true. The state has been created over the past 30 years to benefit specific lobby groups rather than ordinary citizens.”
Mr Maia played a central role in steering the pension reform through Brazil’s fractious lower house. A member of the centre-right Democrats party, he helped secure a required three-fifths majority despite disagreements between supporters of Jair Bolsonaro, the rightwing president in office since January, and those of the leftwing Worker’s Party (PT).
Despite his support for the reform programme, however, he has often been in dispute with Mr Bolsonaro and his scandal-prone inner circle, calling them a “crisis factory”.
Brazil’s economy contracted by more than 7 per cent in the recession of 2015 and 2016 and has struggled to grow by more than 1 per cent a year since then.
Underpinning Mr Maia’s optimism over the pace of future reform was a change in outlook among members of both houses of Congress, from pursuing narrow personal interests to transforming the state in order to release money for investment in productive activity.
“It’s investment that wins votes,” he said, rather than handing out public sector jobs to friends and supporters.
Congress would concentrate on driving forward the economic reform plan, rather than the conservative “values” agenda proposed by Mr Bolsonaro.
Mr Maia noted that Congress had already watered down or rejected several measures proposed by Mr Bolsonaro and his supporters, such as a relaxation of gun controls and a tightening of government secrecy. He said a controversial proposal that would justify the killing of suspects by police officers acting under the influence of “fear, surprise or violent emotion” would not get through Congress.
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Mr Bolsonaro’s sudden rise to power last year was followed by a period of turbulent relations with
Congress in the first months of his presidency. Squabbling among his supporters has festered since and escalated in recent weeks. Mr Maia said Congress would pursue its own course, unaffected by the president’s power struggles.
“When Bolsonaro began to fight with Congress [early in his presidency], a lot of our members thought we should make the government unviable,” Mr Maia said. “Instead, we have kept the economic plan on its feet and disagreed with the values agenda.”
Mr Maia has been praised for his political skills, earning the respect of lawmakers across Brazil’s fragmented legislature composed of almost 30 parties with ill-defined ideologies. One political opponent on the left described him “the right man for the dirty job” of pushing the pension reform through the lower house.
As speaker of the house, he decides which bills will come up for debate. With the executive branch weakened by infighting, he has been able to piece together a coalition of pro-reform legislators.
“It is appropriate to have a coalition government,” he said. “Even those [in Congress] who are against Bolsonaro are not against the reforms.”
Mr Maia smiled at the suggestion that Brazil was operating under a parliamentary rather than a presidential system, and declined to rule out running for the presidency himself one day.
However, despite his success as speaker and his membership of one of Brazil’s best-known political families — his father served three terms as mayor of Rio — he may lack the charisma needed for election to higher office. An attempt to succeed his father as Rio’s mayor in 2012 ended with just 3 per cent of the vote.
Mr Maia stressed he was a force for continuity. The pensions reform approved last week was based on one proposed by the previous government in 2017 and is similar in outline to proposals made in the mid-1990s.
Despite his support for the programme laid out by Paulo Guedes, the economy “superminister”, Mr Maia noted that lawmakers had pulled back from approving the more radical elements of pension reform inspired by the Chicago school of economics of which Mr Guedes is a disciple.
“Congress is not 100 per cent in line with the Chicago school,” he said.
But there are limits to Mr Maia’s power. Many reforms also depend on the Senate, whose president, Daví Alcolumbre, is less willing to press ahead with measures like the privatisation of Eletrobras, the state electric utility. Mr Maia said there was no point in pushing for its sale — essential, he argued, to deliver the investment the sector urgently needs — before the Senate comes on board.
