POLITICS-BRAZIL: New Mayors, Old Problems

By Mario Osava Reprint | | Print |

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Jan 5 2005 (IPS) - Francisco da Costa Vale, the new mayor of the small Brazilian town of Aroazes in the northeastern state of Piauí, began to govern this week from a jail cell, where he is currently being held on charges of orchestrating the murder of one of his predecessors.

Unlike Costa Vale, however, dozens of the more than 5,500 mayors elected in last October’s local elections were unable to take office on Jan. 1 as scheduled.

An alarming number of mayors-elect were prevented from assuming their posts by the retroactive annulment of their candidacies, the overturning of the election results, or other legal decisions.

There are also a number of mayors who have taken office but may be forced to step down in the near future based on rulings by the electoral authorities, who are still dealing with a backlog of pending cases.

Then there are the mayors and city council members who have taken office as planned, but are no longer members of the parties that got them elected in October.

One of these is Cícero Almeida, the new mayor of Maceió, capital of the northeastern state of Alagoas. Elected as a candidate for the Democratic Labour Party, Almeida announced that he no longer belonged to the party, just minutes before being sworn in on Jan. 1.

In Brazil’s largest city, Sao Paulo, city council member Roberto Trípoli officially pulled out of the Brazilian Social Democratic Party (PSDB) to garner the support of opposition parties and get himself elected as the city council president, dealing a heavy political blow to new mayor José Serra during his first minutes in office.

Serra, also of the PSDB, had achieved one of the most significant triumphs in the October elections by defeating incumbent mayor Marta Suplicy, from the leftist Workers Party (PT).

Given that the PT is the party of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the loss of this high-profile mayoralty led many to interpret it as a bad sign for the president’s own re-election chances.

Serra had hoped to have an ally as the council president, but Trípoli’s manoeuvre will make it extremely challenging for him to govern a city of 10.5 million, with an estimated deficit of 10 billion dollars.

Trípoli’s self-serving "defection" has led PT president José Genoino to make an urgent call for a "reorganisation" of the Brazilian electoral system, which permits frequent and numerous shifts in party alliance with no consequences for those involved.

The political composition of Brazil’s national Congress is considerably different today from what it was immediately after the federal elections in 2002. Some parties have lost dozens of deputies, while smaller parties have doubled or even tripled their caucuses in the last two years.

These inter-party "migrations" essentially alter election results and thereby violate the will of the voters, according to those who are pushing for electoral reform to be tackled as a priority issue this coming year, because the imminence of presidential, parliamentary and state elections in 2006 would make it impossible to vote on a bill of this kind.

The composition of the new local governments has also been considerably affected by a record number of legal challenges and rulings, which have kept almost one percent of the mayors elected in October from taking office this week.

The Superior Electoral Court has still not managed to clear up all of the 938 cases, which means that there could be even more annulled candidacies or overturned results.

In Mauá, an important industrial city in the southern state of Sao Paulo, the mayor’s seat has been taken by Green Party candidate Leonel Damo following the annulment of the candidacy of his PT rival Marcio Pires, who was the actual winner at the polls.

In the municipality of Criciuma, a major mining and industrial centre in southern Brazil, the mayor sworn in on Saturday was forced to immediately take a leave of absence, while awaiting the final electoral court decision on a challenge to the legitimacy of his candidacy.

The reform being sought is aimed at avoiding the growing number of election results subject to legal rulings and other shortcomings of the current system, such as the proliferation of parties and electoral fraud.

One of the points that almost all supporters of reform agree upon is the need for public funding for election campaigns. This would help promote greater equality among candidates, since those who enjoy the financial backing of big private companies are at a major advantage under the current conditions.

There are also calls for free campaign advertising time on radio and television, as well as a minimum number of votes for parties to be represented in Congress, with most proponents agreeing on two percent of the national vote and the election of federal deputies in at least five of Brazil’s 26 states.

In accordance with the proposed reforms, coalitions would be prohibited in the elections for federal deputies and city council members, while the votes would not go to individual candidates, but to the parties, which would present slates of candidates.

This "closed-list" system is particularly endorsed by women’s groups, who feel it is the only way of increasing their representation in public office.

Although women’s rights activists succeeded in their push to get legislation passed last decade establishing that at least 30 percent of all parties’ candidates must be women, the failure to adopt any penalties for non-compliance has made it impossible to achieve the goal of gender balance.

Women account for only 8.2 percent of the country’s 513 federal lawmakers, 12.5 percent of state legislators, and 12.6 percent of city council members.

The adoption of a party slate system with an enforced quota for women, who are among the top candidates on the lists, is the only real means of raising the number of women in political office, said Almira Rodrigues, co-director of the Feminist Studies and Advisory Centre (CFEMEA), based in Brasilia.