The parliamentary elections held together with the first round of the presidential elections on October 2 yielded results in which the Liberal Party, a formation that supports President Jair Bolsonaro, was the most voted force. The new composition of the Brazilian legislative body is characterized by having an overwhelming majority of men and by being more conservative than four years ago, although there are also data that show an increase in Afro and indigenous representatives.
Brazil is experiencing the most polarized elections in its recent history. On October 30, President Jair Bolsonaro, who won 43.20% of the votes in the first round, will face former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who won 48.40%. Whoever wins, the new president will have to negotiate with a third of Parliament to obtain a majority.
It will not be an easy task. As of February 1, 2023, Bolsonaro will have the support of 37.6% of the Chamber of Deputies and 31% of the Senate. The parties aligned with Lula, on the other hand, will have 28% and 20% of the seats, respectively. Several political analysts predict that the relationship between Congress and the Executive will be tense, whoever the president may be.
The need to build alliances to ensure governability has been a constant in all successive governments after the military dictatorship. “If we look at what happened in the administrations of the former presidents, we can predict that the coalition will be based on the exchange between ministerial portfolios and support in the Legislative. It was a path widely adopted by all presidents, with the exception of Bolsonaro,” explains Danilo Medeiros, a doctor in Political Science from the University of Virginia and a researcher at the Brazilian Center for Analysis and Planning (Cebrap).
It is to be expected, therefore, that if Lula wins he will try to build a broad coalition, thanks to his well-known negotiating skills. In the case of Bolsonaro, it is worth remembering that during his first term he did not establish any lasting alliance in Parliament.
His style of government was based on specific agreements for each reform or law, using the mediation of the parties of the Center group, in exchange for the so-called ‘secret budget’. Is about federal budget resources handed over to specific deputies or parliamentary groupsso that they implement regional policies in their States of origin.
For Simone Tebet, placed third in the presidential dispute on October 2 and an ally of Lula, “the secret budget may be the largest corruption scheme in the world.” And she may have come to stay. “There are reports of a city in the interior of the State of Maranhão, with a little over 20,000 inhabitants, that carried out more AIDS tests than the entire city of São Paulo, with 12 million inhabitants. In another city, 540,000 teeth were extracted in a single year, which is equivalent to pulling 14 teeth from each mouth, of each citizen, including newborns who do not have teeth”, explained Tebet in a well-known Brazilian podcast.
In the new political scenario, Bolsonaro could benefit from the fact that the Liberal Party (PL), to which he belongs, managed to elect the largest parliamentary group in both the Chamber, with 99 deputies, and the Senate, with 13 seats. It is quite a feat for a formation whose president, Valdemar Costa Neto, was condemned by the Supreme Court for corruption and even served part of the sentence, before receiving the pardon. After the last legislative elections, Lula’s Workers’ Party also increased its presence and became the second parliamentary group, together with the parties of his electoral coalition.
What has become clear is that the next president of Brazil will have to deal with a more conservative Chamber of Deputies, made up of 82.2% men and 17.7% women.
This is the average profile of the 513 newly elected deputies: male, 49 years and 11 months old, white, married, Christian and with higher education. According to a report by the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU), a global organization that collects information from the parliaments of 108 countries, Brazil has one of the oldest Congresses and with fewer women in the world. The most populous country in Latin America ranks 68th in the ranking and is behind Bolivia, Sweden and Portugal, but ahead of the United States and India.
Despite this negative record, Brazil can boast of having elected the largest number of blacks and women in its history, in a country in which 56% of the inhabitants declare themselves of African descent.
Next year there will be 135 Afro deputies, that is, a quarter of the total, in addition to three Asians. This occurs after legislative elections in which, for the first time, there were more black candidates than white ones. Curiously, the parties that elected the most blacks are right-wingwith the Liberal Party of Bolsonaro at the head, which will have 25 Afro deputies in its group.
In addition, one in six parliamentarians will be a woman. The deputies managed to increase their presence in Congress by 2.7%. It is progress, but it is still little if we look at the rest of the planet. In the ranking made by the IPU, which compares the female composition of the Chambers of 182 countries, Brazil remains in position 127, behind Uruguay, Ecuador and Spain, and this despite the record number of women elected this year .
Another novelty of this new legislature is that the indigenous have increased their representativeness by 500%, going from one to five deputies. Four of them are women: Sônia Guajajara (São Paulo); Célia Xakriabá (Minas Gerais); Juliana Cardoso (São Paulo) and Silvia Waiãpi (Amapá).
The latter was the first indigenous woman to join the Brazilian Army in 2011. Today is a former soldier who supports Bolsonaro and maintains that the Armed Forces have an important role in indigenous politics in Brazil. Waiãpi held the position of Secretary of Indigenous Health in the current Government. This year she was the least voted federal deputy in Brazil, with 5,435 votes.
“The fact that a deputy is of indigenous origin does not mean that she defends the collective agendas of the original peoples,” highlights Sônia Guajajara, who belongs to the Guajajara/Tentehar people of the State of Maranhão and received 156,966 votes. “It is impossible to maintain a dialogue with whoever defends Bolsonaro,” she adds. For her part, Joenia Wapichana, who in the past legislation was the only indigenous person in Congress, did not get her re-election.
At the opposite extreme are the arms collectors, who managed to elect 23 representatives in the Senate and in the Chamber of Deputies. This increases the weight of the so-called “parliamentary group of the bullet”, whose objective is to expand the carrying of weapons for the population, with or without Bolsonaro in government.
Its main objective will be to try to unblock in the Senate the bill baptized as “PL of the loose bullet”, which facilitates regulations for the registration and possession of weapons. Today in Brazil there are 700,000 collectors, a number 500% higher than in 2018, before Bolsonaro came to power.
The Senate, made up of 81 members with an eight-year term, will be practically controlled by the Bolsonaristas starting next year. “We will have a more right-wing Senate, which will approve the proposals of greatest interest to Brazil. All of Brazil will benefit from this,” said the president after the elections. Two former Bolsonaro ministers, Tereza Cristina (Agriculture) and Damares Alves (Family and Human Rights) have already run for the Presidency of the Upper House.
A curiosity: the most voted federal deputy in Brazil, Nikolas Ferreiras, publicly distrusts electronic ballot boxes, in tune with the accusations of possible fraud launched by President Bolsonaro and systematically denied by the Superior Electoral Court (TSE).
This 26-year-old, who obtained 1.5 million votes in the State of Minas Gerais, could lose his mandate on charges of spreading false news. There is already a precedent in Brazil. In October 2021, the TSE revoked the mandate and disqualified the state deputy Fernando Destito Francischini, elected in the State of Paraná in 2018. It was precisely for spreading false news against the electronic voting system, in force in Brazil since 1996.
