President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva said today (8) that, starting next week, he will meet with ministries in the area of infrastructure to align the resumption of halted works across the country. The president’s intention is to accelerate deliveries and boost the economy and job creation.
“We are going to try to finish everything that was started and stopped. And we don’t want to know in what period of government it was done, we want to know if the work is in the interest of the city or the state”, said Lula during breakfast with party leaders from the government’s allied base in the National Congress.
Next Tuesday (14th), the president will be in Bahia, inaugurating a popular housing development, and then he will go to Sergipe to participate in an event to resume work on the BR-101.
“We are going to travel with the perspective of putting the economy’s ferris wheel to work,” he said. “If we manage to get all the works that are stopped to start working, we can contribute to making the Brazilian economy not the disaster predicted by the IMF [Fundo Monetário Internacional] in their last evaluation”, he added.
The IMF raised expectations for Brazil’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP, sum of goods and services produced) in 2023, but growth is still low. The growth projection, released in January, went from 1% to 1.2%. On the other hand, the estimate for 2024 fell by 0.4 percentage points, with expectations now of a 1.5% expansion of the economy.
For the president, it is necessary to resume projects aimed at cities, such as basic sanitation, which “creates a lot of jobs and greatly improves people’s quality of life”.
Dialogue
Lula received presidents and leaders of 16 parties for breakfast at the Planalto Palace, in Brasília, and invited deputies and senators from the grassroots to be closer to the Executive on projects of interest. According to the president, the government wants to establish a harmonic, sincere and true relationship with the National Congress.
“Today’s meeting is the beginning of a new relationship between the Executive Branch and the Legislative Branch”, he said. “I am sure [de] that we are going to win a large majority to make the changes we need to make in this country”, he added, highlighting the importance of negotiations being more precise and quick.
“We don’t want disharmony, we want there to be divergence, which is normal, it’s part of the democratic game, we don’t have to agree with everything, and deputies don’t have to approve everything the government sends”, said the president. “We have the chance to show Brazil that it is possible to coexist democratically in diversity.”
The Minister of Institutional Relations, Alexandre Padilha, responsible for articulation with Congress, said that the idea is to maintain a permanent forum, with the expectation of monthly meetings with the President of the Republic. The presidents and leaders of each base party in the Chamber and Senate participated in the meeting, in addition to government leaders in the Chamber, José Guimarães (PT-CE), in the Senate, Jaques Wagner (PT-BA), and in Congress, Randolfe Rodrigues (AP-Network).
Lula stressed, however, that this dynamic does not interfere with dialogue with leaders within Congress, as well as with the presidents of the Chamber and Senate and political parties. “We are going to maintain a permanent dialogue with those parties that today declare themselves to be in opposition to the government, [que] somehow they didn’t want to participate in the government, not only in the debate in the National Congress, but also in the relationship with governors, mayors and society”, highlighted Padilha.
After the opening speeches, the meeting was closed to the press. But on the agenda, was the tax reforma priority for the government and Congress for this year.
coup acts
Padilha also remembered the January 8 coup acts in Brasilia, who complete one month this Wednesday. In a nod to Congress, he thanked the speed in approving the federal intervention in the public security of the Federal District and said that it was the political articulation that “stopped the coup attempt that was orchestrated in this country”.
“Brazil showed that humanity created politics so that our differences would not end in war. It was politics, it was the 27 governors of all parties who came here 24 hours after those acts, it was the surgical intervention carried out by President Lula in the security sector that established order in Brasília, it was the decisive action of the parliamentarians that, 48 hours after the intervention was made, they approved it”, he said.
President Lula also commented on the attempted coup d’état and associated former president Jair Bolsonaro with the coup plotters. “Today I have no doubt [de] that this was engineered by the person most responsible for all the preaching of hate, the industry of lies, of fake news that has happened in this country in the last four years. It doesn’t come from now, it comes from the 2018 elections, when we still hadn’t had the experience of the fake news [notícias falsas] in this country.”
