President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT) thanked deputy Arthur Lira (PP-AL) this Thursday (9) and said that the president of the Chamber “helped him a lot” after the PT member won the presidential elections in 2022 .
Lula and Arthur Lira participated, in São José da Tapera (AL), in the signing of a work order for the execution of a water project, which aims to bring water to the hinterland of Alagoas.
The PT member said that, when he won the elections against former president Jair Bolsonaro (PL), he heard from politicians that he would have “difficulty” governing because Lira, a Bolsonaro supporter, was president of the Chamber.
Afterwards, Lula said that “God wanted him to have” a man from Alagoas in charge of the Chamber this term, just as he had another man from Alagoas, Renan Calheiros (MDB-AL), in the presidency of the Senate in his second term as president. And he amended:
“[Lira] It helped me a lot, because we started governing before taking office. Because he was the one who coordinated, together with Rui Costa and Fernando Haddad, the Proposed Amendment to the Transition Constitution, which allowed us to have money to govern in 2023, which allowed us to have money to recover Bolsa Família, and which we had the courage to announce the PAC in the middle of last year”.
The president stated that the government “had no project of interest” defeated in the Chamber of Deputies.
“We managed to approve all the projects we sent. In a demonstration that our ideological differences are not taken into account when the greater interest is the interest of women, men, children who were born in this country and want to live with dignity in this country”, said Lula.
Lira’s criticisms of the government’s articulation
Arthur Lira says Alexandre Padilha is ‘personally disaffected’ and ‘incompetent’
Despite Lula’s speech, recently, Arthur Lira harshly criticized the Lula government’s political articulation with Congress (remember in the video above).
The parliamentarian from Alagoas even called the Minister of Institutional Relations, Alexandre Padilha, “incompetent” and “personally disaffected”, who is responsible for the Executive’s dialogue with the Legislature.
At the time, Lira was unhappy with what she considered government interference in the Chamber’s internal affairs and also with the government’s delay in releasing parliamentary amendments. After the deputy’s criticism, Lula met with Lira to smooth things over.
Later, in an interview with Pedro Bial, Lira was asked about the comment about Padilha and said that he has no problem recognizing mistakes, but that the minister “made several” with him. The president of the Chamber also stated that before the statement he had been pointing out to the government “that the government’s coordination has not been working for a few months”.
