The president of the Republicans, Marcos Pereira, announced on Saturday, 29, that the party’s bench in the Chamber will vote against the Fake News Bill. Pereira’s move, who is vice-president of the House, occurs to contain a crisis in the party – after the majority of the bench voted in favor of the text being processed on an urgent basis – and creates difficulties for the Planalto Palace.
President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva expects the approval of the project next Tuesday. The proposal establishes the regulation of digital platforms and obligations to social network providers, but is strongly opposed by the so-called big techs, such as Google and Tik Tok, and also by the evangelical segment.
The Republicans have links with the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, and many of its parliamentarians are evangelicals.
The party also houses the governor of São Paulo, Tarcísio de Freitas, seen as a possible candidate to succeed Lula, in 2026, if former president Jair Bolsonaro (PL) becomes ineligible.
Tug of war
In practice, the vote on the Fake News Bill turned into a tug of war between government allies and the opposition. The official argument for evangelicals to be against the proposal is that there is “censorship” of religious freedom.
In recent days, Deputy Orlando Silva (PCdoB-SP), rapporteur for the project, made several changes to the text, in an attempt to contain resistance. It included, for example, an excerpt according to which the law must observe “the free exercise of expression and religious cults (…) and the full exposition of their dogmas and sacred books”. In addition, he withdrew from the proposal the creation of a regulatory agency to supervise digital platforms, ironically baptized by the opposition as the “Ministry of Truth”.
Even so, the Republican leadership – which supported Bolsonaro’s re-election last year – considered the changes insufficient. Behind the scenes, the party is negotiating with Planalto to support a project that expands tax exemptions for churches.
“The Republicans’ decision is to vote no to the fake news project,” said Pereira, who is also a licensed bishop of Universal. “Yes, there must be regulation on the subject (fake news on social networks), but not the one being proposed at the moment (…). The text is still bad”, amended Pereira, in a video posted on social networks.
center
With a bench of 42 deputies, the party has always made up the hard core of Centrão with the PP of the mayor, Arthur Lira (AL), and the PL of Bolsonaro. Recently, however, it formed a block of 142 parliamentarians with acronyms such as MDB and PSD, each of them with three ministries in the government. Pereira is a pre-candidate for the command of the Chamber, in 2025.
The articulation of the Republicans made Lira assemble an even larger group – the so-called “blocão”, with 174 deputies -, isolating the PT and the PL.
Now, six dissident deputies from União Brasil, a party that is part of Lira’s “blocão”, want to migrate to the Republicans. In the group is the Minister of Tourism, Daniela Carneiro, who is a licensed deputy and filed a lawsuit at the Superior Electoral Court (TSE) to disaffiliate from União Brasil without losing her mandate.
Daniela intends to join the Republicans, which could be part of Lula’s allied base in Congress. Currently, the party declares itself independent from the Planalto.
Affiliated with the Republicans, Senator Damares Alves (DF), said she did not understand the urgency to vote on the fake news project. “I find the rush strange. Do they want to silence us during the CPMI?”, she asked, in a reference to the Joint Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry that will investigate the coup acts of January 8, in Praça dos Três Poderes.
Former Minister of Women, Family and Human Rights in the Bolsonaro government, Damares defended more time for the appreciation of the project, claiming that the topic is very delicate.
The information is from the newspaper The State of S. Paulo.
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