Interpretações e poderes em disputa: o ressurgimento do Centrão na política brasileira

Resumen

The Eduardo Cunha (PMDB/MDB-RJ) win's presidency of the Chamber of Deputies, in 2015, made the term “centrão” (a perjorative expression thant means 'big center') in the political news. Faced with the increasing use of this denomination and the reversal of the powers for this group of parties in the relations between the executive and the legislature in the Bolsonaro government, we seek in this article: 1) to reflect on the use of the term in Brazilian political debates, identifying the origin of this denomination and the current meanings of this characterization, as well as, 2) analyze the possible transformations in the political dispute, with its resurgence and ascendancy, identifying the metamorphosis of its application. We analyze the meanings of the use of the term “Centrão” in current national political debates in the columns of Folha de São Paulo from 2016 to 2020. As a result, we seek to identify the parties linked to Centrão in the Bolsonaro government and the composition of the benches. Finally, we recover the debate of legislative studies on institutional incentives and parliamentary behavior in Brazil, highlighting the complexity and analytical challenge for Brazilian political science, in the hot seat between criticism and a moralizing vision of politics. Consequently, in this argumentative exercise, we emphasize that the contradictions that the use of the term carries encourages the analytical expansion of the phenomenon, especially the inclusion of institutional incentives for understanding the behavior of parliamentary actors identified with this block.