Mateus Simões: And what happened afterward is partly due to Covid, partly due to the work we did, partly due to the Minas economy, which is very resilient.
Mateus Simões: I'm saying this more to counter those who want to claim there was one factor that predominantly helped us.
No, what helped was work, responsibility, knowing that there cannot be a deficit, which the federal government seems never to understand.
Mateus Simões: We here have practiced zero deficit for five years; we only ran deficits in the first two years of government, because unfortunately we received a State that was even owing salaries to civil servants.
Mateus Simões: It hadn't even paid the previous year's 13th salary.