TSE rejects Bolsonaro administration consultation on reducing fuel price in election year

The TSE (Superior Electoral Court) rejected this Tuesday (22) a consultation by the AGU (Advocacy-General of the Union) on the possibility of reducing the tax rate on products and inputs in an election year through a law passed in Congress. The issue involved, above all, the price of fuel.

Unanimously, the court decided not to know (that is, to reject without even analyzing the case) the request of the AGU, an agency of the Jair Bolsonaro (PL) government that asked the question.

For the court, the way in which the consultation was carried out is not adequate to obtain advance information about a possible reduction.

The government’s question was whether this reduction would conflict with a section of the Elections Law that vetoes, in an election year, “the free distribution of goods, values ​​or benefits by the public administration”, except in cases of calamity, state emergency or social programs already running since the previous year.

The AGU stated, in the request, that inputs and products, such as oil, medicines and wheat “are subject to exchange rate variation, which, given certain macroeconomic issues and international or domestic pressure, may experience significant variations in their values, with consequent relevant internal economic impact and repercussions on production chains, consumption and employment relations”.

The rapporteur of the case, Minister Carlos Horbach, stated that it is not up to the Judiciary to express itself on demands that are “particular and that are already in a state of gestation” nor in an “excessively abstract” way.

According to him, there are already legislative proposals that are intended to change the form of taxation of fuels, with the objective of limiting or reducing the final price for the consumer.

He cited articles on the subject both in the Chamber of Deputies and in the Senate.

“Given the absence of filling in the abstraction, which translates, in the light of the understanding of this Superior Court, into the complete detachment of concrete cases, combined with the necessary objectivity of the questioning, I understand that the consultation does not fulfill the indispensable presuppositions for its analysis”, he said. Horbach.

He was accompanied by ministers Alexandre de Moraes, Ricardo Lewandowski, Mauro Campbell Marques, Benedito Gonçalves, Sérgio Banhos and Edson Fachin.

The government has taken measures to contain inflation, but through the Executive itself. This Monday (21), the Ministry of Economy announced that it had zeroed the import tax on ethanol and six products from the basic food basket. The impact on public coffers is estimated at R$ 1 billion per year.

The measure covers coffee, margarine, cheese, macaroni, sugar and soy oil and is valid until the end of the year. According to the Ministry of Economy, these are items that register above-average price growth in the last 12 months and whose reduction mainly benefits the low-income population.