POLITICS-BRAZIL: Women Fight it Out in Local Elections

By Mario Osava Reprint | | Print |

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Aug 9 2000 (IPS) - Women running against women for the seat of mayor in three of Brazil’s state capitals is the most novel aspect of the campaign for the Oct 1 municipal elections, as well as a reflection of women’s growing participation in local politics.

Marta Suplicy and Luiza Erundina, two left-wing candidates, are the favourites in the race for mayor of Brazil’s largest city and economic hub, Sao Paulo, population 10 million.

The latest opinion polls show that the Workers’ Party’s Suplicy is the front-runner with 26 percent ratings, against socialist Erundina’s 17 percent.

The only candidate who could prevent a runoff between Suplicy and Erundina in a second round of voting is former mayor Paulo Maluf, who trails Erundina with 15 percent in the polls. But his image has been splattered by a corruption scandal that is shaking the government of his protégé, Mayor Celso Pitta.

Female candidates are also slugging it out in the campaign for mayor in the northeastern cities of Natal and Maceió.

That region, Brazil’s poorest, is precisely where women have the strongest voice in local government, said sociologist Delaine Martins Costa, coordinator of the Nucleus of Women and Public Policies of the Brazilian Institute of Municipal Administration.

The three races in which both front-runners are women is the most novel aspect of the current campaign, which will bring about a continued increase in women’s presence in local governments, Martins Costa pointed out.

In 1996, when a system of quotas was adopted to force parties to reserve at least 20 percent of their candidacies for women, the number of female city councillors rose by 111 percent, to a total of 6,536 nationwide, said Almira Rodrigues, with the Women’s Research and Consulting Centre (Cfemea).

In addition, 302 women mayors were elected, 60 percent more than in the previous elections, held in 1992, before any mechanisms had been put in place to boost the participation of women.

In this year’s local elections, at least 30 percent of the candidates for town council fielded by the parties must be women. Analysts thus predict that the number of women councillors will double once again, said Rodrigues.

But even if that does occur, women will still account for less than 12 percent of the total number of city councillors in Brazil, said Martins Costa.

The growth in the number of female town councillors has been partly the result of an increase in the number of municipalities, from 4,972 in 1996 to the present 5,505.

Moreover, women’s increased participation in local government has not been reflected at higher levels. In Brazil’s national Congress, for example, women have actually lost ground in the past few elections, with the number of female lawmakers dropping from 34 in the 1994 elections to 28 in 1998.

Martins Costa pointed to a “gender divide” or glass ceiling in politics, in which women’s growing participation is only tolerated at the local level, where women are traditionally closely involved in social and community questions.

That phenomenon has been especially prevalent in the northeast, a region where “family networks” are strong, and where women have long played a role in municipal governments.

After rising to top offices at a municipal level, male leaders of a clan often move on to the state or federal level, leaving their wives or other close relatives as their local political heirs, she explained.

Thus, women already governed 3.2 percent of municipalities in the northeast by 1973, and 8.6 percent in 1997 — in both instances more than double the proportions seen in the more developed regions of southern and southeastern Brazil.

Nevertheless, the growing number of female mayors makes women’s progress in winning spaces in politics more visible, and the office of mayor often serves as a stepping-stone to the office of state governor, rarely won by women in Brazil up to now.

Besides the three state capitals in which women are expected to dispute the office of mayor between themselves, there are leading female candidates in other major cities, such as Fortaleza, the capital of the state of the same name, also in the northeast.

And in the state of Sao Paulo, popular female candidates are running for mayor in Santos, Brazil’s largest port, and Sao José dos Campos, the capital of Brazil’s aeronautics industry.

The women’s movement remains critical of the parties, which have generally failed to fully respect the quota law, or which pay little attention to their female candidates, who are often registered merely to comply with the law.

New mechanisms are needed to boost women’s participation, especially in parliament, say activists.

A district-based electoral system, with seats representing a specific constituency, “would favour the representation not only of women, but of minorities as well, such as Blacks and the disabled,” said Maria Aparecida de Laia, the president of the Council on the Situation of Women in Sao Paulo.

Or the system could be a mixed one, with some candidates elected by district and some elected according to the current system, in which everyone disputes the votes from the entire municipality or state, said Laia.

That would give more chances to candidates known for their social involvement in certain neighbourhoods, while reducing the influence of big money publicity campaigns, she added.

Today, political parties give priority to the candidates with the widest name recognition, who can draw many votes from throughout the entire municipality or state, and thus boost the party’s overall representation.

The parties channel most of their financial resources into the campaigns of these prominent candidates, at the expense of women, who are generally much less widely known because they are new on the political scene — a dynamic that tends to favour the status quo and work against change, said Laia.