The big democracy where lawmakers are mightier than the executive
When the Legislature Outgrows the Presidency: Brazil’s Inverted Power Problem
A Race That May Not Matter
Bharatmorningnews.com – On October 4th, Brazilian voters will choose between two sharply opposed presidential candidates. The incumbent, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva — universally called Lula — is an 80-year-old left-winger seeking another term. Opposing him is Flávio Bolsonaro, a 44-year-old son of former populist president Jair Bolsonaro, who now sits under house arrest after attempting a coup following his defeat in the 2022 vote. Every one of the 513 lower-house seats will be contested, alongside two-thirds of the Senate.
Yet the most powerful bloc in the outgoing Congress, the Centrão (big centre), holding 46% of seats, has announced it will stay neutral. Party leaders are letting local politicians back whichever candidate pleases them. Many observers in Brasília believe the eventual winner will be compelled to surrender to congressional demands regardless of who takes office.
How the Legislature Seized the Reins
Over the last ten years, a string of weak presidents allowed Congress to absorb authority once reserved for the executive. In 2016, amid a sprawling corruption investigation that swept in dozens of legislators, lawmakers moved to impeach then-president Dilma Rousseff — a left-winger — partly because they judged she was doing too little to shield them from investigators. Her replacement, Michel Temer, governed with minimal popular backing.
Jair Bolsonaro, who held office from 2019 through 2022, handed legislators ever-larger slices of the federal budget as a defensive measure against impeachment threats, particularly after his disastrous management of the covid-19 pandemic. The result: Brazilian legislators now command 25% of discretionary spending in the federal budget, up from just 2% in 2015.
An International Anomaly
That level of legislative budgetary control is extraordinary by global standards. Marcos Mendes of Insper, a university in São Paulo, together with Hélio Tollini, a budget adviser to the lower house, examined congressional amendment practices across eleven OECD member states. In Canada and Australia, parliamentarians hold no authority to amend the budget or earmark funds for themselves. In the United States, France, Italy, and Spain, roughly 1% of discretionary spending is channeled through congressional amendments, and those proposals are not guaranteed acceptance.
Brazil operates under entirely different rules. The budget is now legally required to contain a dedicated line item for congressional amendments. Lawmakers frequently fail to specify what the allocated money will actually fund. They have tied the amendment total to revenue growth, ensuring their grants expand automatically year after year. Rules governing transparency and traceability in how those funds are deployed have been effectively dismantled.
The Money Machine and Its Political Payoff
In absolute terms, the sum Congress controls is not enormous. More than 90% of Brazil’s 6.5-trillion-real ($1.2-trillion) budget goes to mandatory outlays — public-sector salaries, pensions, debt servicing. That mandatory share is climbing fast, compressing the discretionary envelope. By 2026, only 3.7% of the budget, equivalent to $46 billion, remained available for discretionary use. Of that, Congress commands $12 billion.
Unrestricted access to that cash has supercharged incumbents’ re-election prospects, enabling them to bankroll flashy local projects that win constituent goodwill. In the most recent local ballot, held in 2024, when Brazilians elected more than 5,500 mayors and tens of thousands of city councillors, a record 81% of sitting officeholders who chose to run again retained their posts. Heading into the upcoming general election, 87% of lower-house members are seeking re-election — the highest proportion in Brazilian history.
The Broader Democratic Question
For a decade, democracies from the United States to Turkey to India have watched executives consolidate authority and erode the institutions meant to constrain them. Brazil appears to be running the experiment in reverse: its executive has shed clout to the courts and, above all, to Congress. The balance has tilted so far that some Brazilians are beginning to recognise a parallel danger — that an overmighty legislature, no less than an overmighty presidency, poses a genuine threat to democratic governance.
In Brazil’s fragmented party system, where presidents rarely command a congressional majority, control of the budget had long been a powerful bargaining chip for the executive.
That chip now sits firmly in the other hand.
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