Opinion – Vinicius Torres Freire: Simone Tebet assumes ministry that needs to reinvent

Simone Tebet goes to Planning. It is a last-minute arrangement so that Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva can save face with the idea of ​​a “broad front”, at least with regard to the composition of the ministry.

The Ministry of Planning almost does not exist. Over the past 30 years, it has been quartered, dehydrated, sliced, attached, and extinguished, the last time by Jair Bolsonaro. It resurrects, time and time again, as a portfolio that draws up the Budget, takes care of public administration, state-owned companies (about which little is said), and assets, with Ipea and IBGE, autonomous, under its wings.

Public administration and assets, under Lula 3, go to the Ministry of Management. Tebet stays with Budget and State. As the cliché says, Planning is a character looking for an author.

The minister will need to invent a folder to call her own. Maybe it could have influence on the PPI (Investment Partnerships Program), but it’s hard to see how. In addition to being almost certainly in the Civil House, under Rui Costa (PT), the PPI has an autonomous Board of Directors, composed and directed by other ministers; their actions are carried out by any ministry.

It is ironic that the PPI is under the command of a PT ministry, although it makes sense, in part, because the Civil House has a coordinating role.

The program was created by Michel Temer, in 2016, and serves to expand “interaction between the State and the private sector… for the execution of public infrastructure projects and other privatization measures”.

But this is where there can be some “strategic planning” and investment guidance, through private sector pushes and guarantees.

In addition, Tebet and advisers can play an important role in the discussion of the new tax rule – which could also cause problems. Who will your team be? His group is what is called “liberal” or “orthodox”.

According to the zunzum, Tebet could even invent a system for evaluating budget programs (they are created and live, by inertia and minor interests, without evaluation of effectiveness).

The Ministry of Planning, in the post-death of “strategic planning”, became just the manager of a few government functions. Almost 30 years ago, it is a practical and ideological anachronism. The height of the idea of ​​strategic plans in Brazil was in the 1950s. The portfolio was created in 1962, to house the great Celso Furtado, his Triennial Plan and the Development Council. It came to almost nothing.

During the dictatorship, he was responsible for major development plans, a mixture of interventionist macroeconomic policies, colossal investment and reform programs. It all ended badly, with the military dictatorship, with hyperinflation and a decade and a half of economic disaster; with the decline of developmentalism and the liberal counteroffensive.

Furthermore, other institutions were created to “plan”, with a capital “p” or, more commonly, a small one. The Ministry of Finance has become predominant, both because of the need to stabilize the economy of an inflationary country (a priority for the short term) and because of the change in more generally accepted economic thinking, for which the old planning is an aberration.

In the final years of the dictatorship, the existence of Planning and Finance provoked disputes over control of economic policy. More by tradition than by equality of forces between the portfolios, this dispute lasted until the middle of the FHC government, then something caricatured and irrelevant. Planning didn’t have the muscle to be the protagonist of anything.

In order to grow and appear, Simone Tebet will have to invent her ministry.