POLITICS-BRAZIL: Female Candidate at Crest of ‘Red Wave’

By Mario Osava Reprint | | Print |

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Oct 30 2000 (IPS) - The second round of municipal elections in Brazil Sunday amply confirmed the continued growth of the left, which chalked up its most resounding victory at the hands of a female candidate.

Marta Suplicy triumphed in Sao Paulo, and will govern the biggest city in the world’s eighth largest economy for the next four years.

Her performance could speed up or curb the current ascent of the leftist Workers Party (PT), and is expected to give women’s participation in public office a boost.

The PT, the main opposition force to President Fernando Henrique Cardoso, emerged as the strongest urban party from Sunday’s elections, after winning 13 of the 31 municipal governments up for grabs in the run-off. As of Jan 1, it will govern six of Brazil’s 26 state capitals and 11 of the country’s biggest cities.

In accordance with Brazilian law, a second round of voting was held in municipalities with more than 200,000 voters where no candidate garnered an absolute majority of ballots in the first poll, on Oct 1.

The PT was the “big winner” in the elections, acknowledged the leader of the conservative Liberal Front Party (PFL), Senate president Antonio Carlos Magalhaes, considered the left’s most outspoken enemy in Brazil.

The PFL “lost,” admitted the president of the party, Senator Jorge Bornhausen, referring to the party’s defeat in Rio de Janeiro and Recife, one of the large state capitals in northeastern Brazil, where the PT unexpectedly triumphed by a margin of 0.76 percent of the votes.

Mayor-elect Joao Paulo Lima e Silva is a former metal-worker and an advocate of “democratic socialism” who will restore Recife’s moniker of “red city,” gained due to its frequent preference for leftist candidates — a nickname it lost in the 1980s.

The growth of the PT, the so-called “red wave” that political analysts say is moving north from southern Brazil, was especially marked in Sunday’s poll. Brazil’s largest leftist party will now govern one of the big capitals in each of the country’s major regions.

Porto Alegre in the south will have a PT mayor for the fourth term in a row. The party has also returned to power in the city of Sao Paulo, which it governed from 1989 to 1992, but under less favourable conditions than those enjoyed by the left today. And besides Recife, the party won Goiania, a capital in central- western Brazil, while holding on to the northern city of Belem.

The president of the PT, parliamentary Deputy Jose Dirceu, declared “the triumph of ethics,” referring to the transparency that tends to mark PT administrations, and the fight against corruption, the achilles’ heel of Suplicy’s adversary Paulo Maluf, who was implicated in a string of scandals that have shaken Sao Paulo since last year.

The strengthening of the PT nationwide was due to its identification with “ethics, honesty, the fight for democracy and the struggle against inequality,” said Suplicy, who thanked the 3.25 million voters who ensured her triumph in Sao Paulo, against the 2.3 million votes taken by Maluf.

The party “has changed greatly since 1995,” having learned to handle conflicts and to put a stronger accent on dialogue, said Dirceu. He stressed, however, that it was “still red,” and that it would continue to advocate social change.

Observers agree that the PT, which emerged in 1980, has become more moderate, moving closer to the middle classes, and distancing itself somewhat from its origins as a radical workers party. As an illustration of that tendency, most of the PT mayors elected in the first and second round of the local elections are university graduates.

Suplicy, for example, is a psychologist. And like her husband, Senator Eduardo Suplicy, she comes from a family that forms part of Sao Paulo’s traditional moneyed elite — a fact that helped to weaken the conservative local population’s rejection of the left, and to drum up support from a wider range of social sectors.

“Yes, Doña Marta is of the PT,” Suplicy stated in the speech in which she thanked her voters, as if it were necessary to remind people of her link with the party that emerged from the trade union movement and continues to be led by a former metal-worker, Luiz Inacio “Lula” da Silva.

Besides contributing decisively to the expansion of the left in the local elections by putting 10 million Brazilians under her leadership in Sao Paulo, Suplicy represents the rise of a feminist to one of the country’s most politically powerful positions.

Nevertheless, the proportion of offices held by women grew very little in the elections, with female candidates winning just 5.6 percent of mayors’ offices and 11.6 percent of the seats on town councils, despite the fact that by law, parties were to reserve 30 percent of their candidacies to town councils for women.

The quota law, first applied in 1996, was sponsored by Suplicy herself when she served as a lawmaker in the national Congress from 1995 to 1998.

Although four other women will govern state capitals over the next four years, those cities are small and medium in size, and are far-removed from the country’s decision-making centres.

That puts even greater responsibility on Suplicy as the leading representative of a hope that in the not-so-distant future, women will have a broader presence at all levels of public office in this South American country of 168 million.