Brazil's 2026 campaign is officially underway, and almost all the attention will be on the presidential race. That's a problem, because power in Brazil is increasingly won and lost in Congress — where the budget is controlled and where any president's agenda lives or dies.

Gustavo Ribeiro and James Green are joined by political scientist Beatriz Rey, a researcher at the University of Lisbon, who recently coordinated a Fernando Henrique Cardoso Foundation policy paper with Sergio Fausto on how to fix the way Congress operates.

Her argument isn't that Congress got too strong. Two decades of incremental change made the legislature a genuine co-policymaker, and that part is healthy.

The trouble is that much of that strength was built through the back door: a Leaders' Council that met in restaurants and living rooms instead of the chamber, hybrid sessions designed for a pandemic that never went away, provisional decrees that expire because nobody bothers to vote, a speaker who can yank any bill out of committee, and informal working groups that now write entire bills with no paper trail and no obligation to reflect the party balance of the House.