Nearly eight years after signing the law that opened the doors to betting in Brazil, former president Michel Temer spoke about his decision in an interview on the program Frente a Frente, on Canal UOL, aired this Monday (6th).
Asked about the current scenario, with surveys indicating that a significant portion of Brazilians face financial or mental health problems linked to betting, Michel Temer said: “I don’t applaud that act of mine.”
The statement acknowledges the alleged damage caused by the popularization of the sector, although Temer refused to label it as regret.
Using a phrase from Juscelino Kubitschek, “I have no commitment to error,” he argued that the 2018 measure was taken under strong pressure for the legalization of physical casinos.
“There was a very strong attempt to establish casinos in the country. And the resistance to casinos was very strong. The intermediate path that seemed appropriate to me at that moment was to authorize (sports betting). A lesser evil,” Temer justified.
The former president argued that today the government should implement “strict regulation” and “highly specialized oversight” to prevent illegal gambling and tackle the problem of easy access via mobile phones, which expands the reach of betting.
Although the law was sanctioned at the end of his term, regulation only came about in 2023, under the Lula government. For Temer, the ease of mobile access turned gambling into a problem of unprecedented scale, which “is not useful for the country.”
State oversight
During the interview, the former president suggested that the path forward requires strict oversight and specific restrictions. Temer defended a “beneficial oversight for society,” comparing it to the mandatory use of seat belts.
He raised the possibility of banning Bolsa Família beneficiaries from using those funds on betting platforms. “Whoever receives Bolsa Família didn’t earn that money on their own, they received it as a government benefit. So, I think the government can intervene […] I want that money to be dedicated to their children, to their wife,” he pondered.
The legal perspective
While the political debate is divided between individual freedom and state intervention, experts consider that the crux of the matter lies in the effectiveness of regulation.
“The blame doesn’t lie with the law, but with the political cowardice that created more than five years of regulatory vacuum. The betting market already existed before 2018, legal, illegal and clandestine, moving billions without paying a single cent in taxes; the law merely fulfilled the role of bringing this activity into legality,” says Paulo Horn, lawyer and pre-candidate for State Deputy of Rio de Janeiro.
For him, the Bolsonaro government “failed in its duty” by allowing the legal deadline to regulate the sector to expire in December 2022, out of “fear of friction with ideological and religious caucuses.”
“This moralism of convenience pushed billions beyond the reach of the tax authorities and delayed safeguards against abusive advertising, money laundering and family indebtedness,” he states.
Horn also criticizes the lack of differentiated treatment between companies that paid R$30 million for a license and those that remain operating illegally.
“Blind prohibitionism already failed in Brazil in 1946 and only fuels the parallel market. The State should not act as a guardian of others’ morals, but fulfill its constitutional duty: regulate rigorously, tax fairly and allocate resources to health and safety,” he concludes.
Law No. 13,756/2018
Sanctioned by Michel Temer on December 12, 2018, the law mainly deals with the creation of the National Public Security Fund (FNSP) and the allocation of revenue from federal lotteries. However, its Article 29 establishes the lottery category of “fixed-odds betting,” the legal framework that legalizes sports betting in Brazil for the first time in more than seventy years.