BRAZIL: Pres. Candidates Face High Expectations for Social Action

By Mario Osava Reprint | | Print |

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Oct 5 2002 (IPS) - Preventing Brazil’s financial collapse will be the first duty of the winner of the presidential elections, the first round of which is this Sunday, with Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in the lead, but the major challenge of the upcoming four-year term will be to reduce the country’s profound social inequalities and poverty.

Brazil is among the countries with the biggest gap between rich and poor, to the point that some sociologists use the term "Brazilianisation" to describe processes in other countries in which the poor distribution of wealth continues to worsen.

The demand for solutions to this problem will affect whoever wins the presidency, but will be especially burdensome for front-runner Lula, of the leftist Workers Party (PT). He is seen as the standard-bearer of movements that have historically been involved in social justice issues.

Lula has expanded his electoral base by reaching out to the right-leaning Liberal Party and naming one of its leaders, textile mogul José Alencar, as his running mate, ignoring the protests of the PT’s grassroots.

According to the national Electoral Tribunal, 115,324,050 Brazilians are obligated to vote in Sunday’s elections (though abstention still is likely to average 10 percent). For the first time, the elections will involve electronic ballots, a move aimed at facilitating the count but also at preventing violence or fraud.

In these general elections, 18,880 candidates are competing: six for the presidency, 213 for the 27 state governorships, and the rest for the 54 national Senate seats to be filled, and the 513 seats in the Chamber of Deputies, as well as the 1,059 posts in the state legislatures.

Lula, the 57-year-old former metalworker, holds the lead in the presidential race, and may even win the elections outright, without the need for the runoff vote slated for Oct 27.

The latest polls of the electorate give the candidate for the coalition Lula President, consisting of the leftist PT and the Liberal Party, a good chance of winning the majority plus one valid votes necessary on Sunday.

His nearest rival, José Serra, 60, has the support of the Fernando Henrique Cardoso government and of the "Grand Alliance" between the Brazilian Social Democratic Party (PSDB) and the Brazilian Democratic Movement Party (PMDB), two of the country’s leading political forces.

Ciro Gomes, 44, candidate for the Labourist Front, made up of the leftist labour parties, and Anthony Gartinho, 42, of the Socialist Party, are on Serra’s heals, but the latest surveys of public opinion show the two candidates slipping farther behind.

Lula’s candidacy has been given a boost by two former presidents who have thrown their support behind the metalworker-turned-politician, José Sarney (1985-1990) and Itamar Franco (1992-1994), both of the PMDB.

The gap between rich and poor in this giant South American nation – home to more than 160 million people – is seen as the result of a series of economic crises over the last 20 years.

Inequalities, impunity and the ease of obtaining weapons are blamed as the main causes of the rise in violence that costs Brazil 1.9 percent of its gross domestic product (GDP) in medical treatment for its victims, says a World Health Organisation report released Thursday.

The percentage of people without enough income to pay for their basic necessities was reduced by the implementation in 1994 of Plan Real, which put an end to three decades of high inflation, though it has begun an upwards climb again in the last three years.

In 1993, 41.7 percent of the population lived in such a situation, falling to 32.7 percent in 1998. But last year, 33.6 percent could not meet their basic necessities on their income, reflecting the turning point in 1999, when the financial crisis caused a sharp depreciation of the national currency, the real.

In 2001, 58 million people earned less than they needed to ensure a minimally decent standard of living, and of them, at least 22 percent lacked sufficient income to maintain adequate nutrition.

The Gini Index, used to measure income inequalities, showed little variation in Brazil over the past two decades, with 0.583 in 1981 and 0.572 in 2001, according to the Institute of Applied Economic Research (IPEA), a division of the Planning Ministry.

These values are among the worst for developing countries with economic situations similar to Brazil’s, and as far as the income gap, "the only country with an industrial base comparable to Brazil’s is South Africa," IPEA researcher Sergei Soares told IPS.

Brazil suffers greater inequality than Mexico and much more than Argentina, and poverty here "is not a problem of income, but rather of its distribution," says Soares.

In countries with similar per capita income, the poor represent 10 percent of the population, while in Brazil they are 30 percent, he adds.

Inequalities are also evident with regard to race and gender. For the same type of work, blacks earn, on average, much less than whites, and women earn much less than men. As such, black women suffer the worst discrimination when it comes to pay, according to IPEA.

The need for policies to reduce poverty and fight social injustices marks the political platforms of the four leading presidential candidates, all of whom have said they will make job creation and wage increases a priority.

The candidates have also said they will promote the social position of blacks through admissions quotas at public universities and in access to public sector jobs.

Women’s rights activists, meanwhile, are demanding a greater presence of women in lawmaking positions.

Six years ago, Parliament passed legislation to ensure that each party presented a minimum of 30 percent women on their lists for elected posts, but the law has largely been ignored.

Of the thousands candidates in the running for lawmaking positions in Sunday’s elections, just 14.6 percent are women, according to figures from the election authorities.

The indigenous community is also trying to make its voice heard, but there are only 21 candidates on the ballots for lawmaking positions, says the Indigenous Missionary Council, an organisation linked to the Catholic Church.

The debut of the digitised ballot is aimed to facilitate voting in the far reaches of the country and the final count, and entailed the distribution of more than 406,000 electronic voting stations throughout the countries, as well as to some cities abroad where Brazilians are authorised to vote for their president back home.

In the Amazon region, helicopters and boats will be mobilised to deliver the electronic ballot equipment to regional capitals in order to transmit the data by satellite to the main vote counting centre.

Seventy representatives from 37 countries and three international organisations – all invited by Brazil’s Electoral Tribunal – will observe Sunday’s elections, keeping an eye on the new digital process.

BRAZIL: Pres. Candidates Face High Expectations for Social Action

By Mario Osava Reprint | | Print |

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Oct 5 2002 (IPS) - Preventing Brazil’s financial collapse will be the first duty of the winner of the presidential elections, the first round of which is this Sunday, with Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in the lead, but the major challenge of the upcoming four-year term will be to reduce the country’s profound social inequalities and poverty.
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