PT’s Internal War Over Public Campaign Cash Exposes the Party’s Real Priorities
By Hotspotnews
While the Workers’ Party lectures Brazilians about equality and social justice, 25 of its own candidates in Minas Gerais are threatening to drag the party into court because they were left with little or no money from the Electoral Fund. The group—11 running for state deputy and 14 for federal deputy—says the national leadership created a new low-tier category that left them with R$10,000 or nothing at all, while other PT candidates were allocated as much as R$2.4 million.
They are now demanding a minimum floor of R$80,000 per candidacy, to be paid for by shaving roughly 7 percent from the bigger allocations. If the party does not yield, they say they will seek a court injunction. The candidates plan to hand a manifesto to party leaders and President Lula this weekend in Belo Horizonte.
This is not a dispute over ideology. It is a fight over taxpayer money. The Electoral Fund is public money collected from Brazilian citizens and handed to parties to finance campaigns. The same party that routinely denounces “privilege” and “elites” has internally decided that some of its candidates deserve multimillion-real war chests while others get scraps. When the leftovers complain, they threaten lawsuits against their own comrades.
The episode reveals how opaque and hierarchical the distribution process really is. According to the dissatisfied group, the Minas Gerais PT submitted candidates in three categories, only for the national executive to invent a fourth category that conveniently received no resources. The result is a public spectacle of petistas accusing other petistas of unfairness—exactly the kind of “family fight” that opposition voices have long predicted would surface once the money started flowing.
Voters in Minas Gerais and across Brazil are entitled to ask a simple question: if the PT cannot even distribute public campaign funds among its own members without threats of litigation, why should anyone trust it to manage far larger sums of public money once in office?
WHERE -IS- THE MONEY?
The money is public money — collected from Brazilian taxpayers through the federal budget and handed to parties as the Fundo Especial de Financiamento de Campanha (FEFC). For 2026 the total pot is roughly R$4.9 billion. The PT received the second-largest share: R$615.4 million.
That R$615 million did not disappear. The national party executive decides how to slice it. They created internal categories (G1, G2, G3 and a new G4). The 25 Minas Gerais candidates were placed in G4 and told they would get R$10,000 or nothing. Meanwhile some PT federal-deputy campaigns were allocated as much as R$2.4 million, and Lula’s own presidential campaign has already received R$35 million from the same fund.
In short: the money is still inside the PT. Leadership concentrated it on the races it considers most important and left a group of its own candidates with almost nothing. Those candidates are now threatening to sue the party to force a redistribution.
This is how the system works. Parties, not individual candidates or voters, control the public campaign cash. When the internal allocation looks unfair even to the party’s own members, the result is exactly what we are seeing in Minas Gerais.
Sources: TSE figures reported by CNN Brasil, Metrópoles and Revista Oeste (August 2026).
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