The government was in the mood to celebrate Christmas, celebrating the resumption of the polls and the outcome of the tariff battle, when it was caught on the wrong foot by the new phase of the investigation into the INSS scandal, which reached number 2 in the Ministry of Social Security, the vice-president of the government in the Senate and which got closer to Lula’s family.
When it came to light, during the first half of the year, the affair of illegal reductions in the social security benefits of millions of INSS retirees and retirees was responsible for Lula’s decline in popularity and revived, in the minds of a large part of the electorate, the association between him and his party, the PT, with corruption cases. The Quaest survey released this week places the fight against corruption as one of the worst-rated areas of government. For 55% of those questioned, the way the Lulista government is handling this issue is bad or very bad.
Planalto’s entire communication strategy in the case of the INSS consisted of blaming the Bolsonaro administration, since the system of reductions without authorization of beneficiaries began under the previous government. But, from the start, the list of entities involved and the fact that the volume of diverted resources increased explosively starting in 2021 made this game of hustling difficult.
Today things are getting worse, because a pro-government senator is designated by the federal police as a hidden partner in the criminal scheme, and the executive secretary of Minister Wolney Queiroz, appointed after the investigation, is under house arrest, as shown in a spreadsheet seized by the federal police as having received bribes from Antônio Carlos Camilo Antunes, the bald man of the INSS.
During the traditional end-of-year breakfast with the journalists who cover Planalto, while he intended to discuss the good news of the year (approval of the income tax reform, reversal of tax rates and recovery in the polls) and sow the seeds of his re-election campaign, Lula had to endure the embarrassment of saying that if any of his family members were involved in the pension scandal, they should be investigated. This is not the first time that the name of Fábio Luís Lula da Silva, known as Lulinha, is mentioned in thorny cases for the PT and the PT governments.
In this new phase of the INSS investigations, the Federal Police seized messages in which Antunes ordered the transfer of R$300,000 to the company of Roberta Luchsinger, a friend of Lulinha. In the message, Careca of the INSS describes her as a friend of the “boy’s son”. The name “Fábio” appears in the dialogues between Antunes and the businesswoman.
The affair and, above all, the mentions of Lulinha are a big deal for Bolsonarism, which had remained without a flag throughout the year, with the conviction and imprisonment of Bolsonaro and other setbacks, such as the revocation of the mandate of Eduardo Bolsonaro for misconduct, determined this Thursday by the President of the House, Hugo Motta. Finding the key to linking Lula and the PT to the corruption scandals was one of the keys to the recipe that led Bolsonaro, until then a member of a dwarf party and considered a lower-clergy deputy with little political viability, to win the 2018 elections.
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This strategy had already been constructed by Bolsonaro on social networks since at least 2016, during the debate on the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff and, even with the revision of a series of Lava-Jato decisions, including the conviction of Lula, research shows that the association of the president and his party with “theft” remained indelible among a part of the electorate that was once tucana and has migrated strongly to the right in recent years.
All Lula didn’t need was a glass ceiling in this area, at a time when Bolsonaro is in prison and Bolsonarism is in turmoil, with no axis around which to try to straighten out Flávio’s candidacy.
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