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BRAZILIAN leftwingers and academics warned of attacks on the poorest on Tuesday after the lower house of Congress voted for a 20-year public spending freeze.
The Chamber of Deputies backed unelected President Michel Temer’s government on Monday night, voting 366-111 for the constitutional amendment capping annual spending increases to the rate of inflation.
The amendment still has to pass another supermajority vote in the chamber before being sent to the Senate. Communist Party of Brazil Congress minority leader Jandira Feghali called the vote the “second phase of the coup” — a reference to the August 31 Senate vote to impeach elected president Dilma Rousseff over allegations of corruption.
“I wonder how the deputies will sleep after voting for something which excludes so many people with false arguments, starting from a false basis of a false economic analysis,” she said.
University of Brasilia professor of public policy Daniel Bin told Latin American broacaster Telesur: “It is not hard to predict how this will hit, with unprecedented violence, the poorest people, who depend on public funded education and healthcare.”
