Haddad has already worked in a bank and participated in the creation of the Fipe table and PPPs

25 years ago, Fernando Haddad was a professor of the Modern Political Thought course at the Faculty of Philosophy, Letters and Human Sciences at USP. In the curriculum were “The Federalist” and “The Democracy in America”, which deal with the foundations of the North American democratic system. Of economics, little was said. The exception was the professor’s criticism of FHC’s government, branded as “neoliberal”.

But it was through economics, one of his training areas, that the future Minister of Finance entered the public sector. Some of his initiatives in this area were also perpetuated, such as the creation of the Fipe Table and the project that gave rise to the Law of Public-Private Partnerships.

“We need to overcome the idea that everything is either public or private. The world doesn’t work that way anymore. I had the honor of being invited by Guido Mantega to go to Brasilia to draft the law on PPPs (Public-Private Partnership). I not only wrote this law, but also created the largest PPP in Brazil, which is ProUni”, he said recently when commenting on the initiative.

It was in the late 1990s that Haddad began the transition between theory and practice, and between the public and private sectors, in the economic area.

He had already worked in popular commerce in São Paulo with his father and, for a brief period, as an analyst for a large financial institution. In 1990, he completed his master’s degree in economics at USP, when he published the thesis “The Socioeconomic Character of the Soviet System”, in addition to the books “The Soviet System and its decadence” and “In defense of socialism”.

Economic themes also stood out in the articles written for this Sheet🇧🇷 “Privatization and public deficit” (07/26/1990) and “Privatization and efficiency” (08/25/1990) are among the first. Both in the economics section.

At the age of 27, the then lawyer and graduate student in economics at USP was not entirely against the sale of state-owned companies, but he had some reservations.

“If privatization is a desirable objective, it is for reasons different from those presented by liberal thought (…) From the macroeconomic point of view, privatization cannot be seen as a remedy for settling public accounts and, from the microeconomic point of view, it does not necessarily imply greater efficiency of the productive apparatus”, wrote Haddad.

His experience in public management began in 2001, at the São Paulo City Hall Finance Department, when he inherited the Celso Pitta administration’s financial problems.

Later, at the Ministry of Planning, he was one of those responsible for the PPP project.

As mayor, from 2013 he had to deal with a situation of lack of cash and high debt that would give him many fights with the City Council of São Paulo.

In 2015, the then 52-year-old mayor, also in an article for the Sheet, celebrated the unprecedented investment grade obtained by the municipality from the risk rating agency Fitch Ratings — a period in which Brazil’s sovereign rating had been downgraded. He awarded the “seal of good payer” to the cut of current expenses, the framing of the payroll within the limits of the Fiscal Responsibility Law and the reduction of the municipality’s debt.

In 2016, he was not re-elected. From 2017 to 2021, he taught undergraduate and master’s classes in Insper’s public management program, work interrupted during the 2018 presidential campaign and completed before this year’s elections.

A colleague who lived with the future minister in the classrooms at that time says that Haddad, once, claimed to have with the now elected vice president, Geraldo Alckmin (PSD), 70% of agreement on several subjects. In the coming years it will be possible to know what the other 30% consists of.