By CHICO WHITAKER*
Will radically different electoral campaigns for Municipal Chambers be possible in 2024?
A proposal with this objective has been consolidated in a series of Knowledge Exchange Circles, promoted by Universidade Mutua, a new organization that works with this Freirean method of teaching (ocandeeiro.org/unimutua).
These Circles brought together, over the course of several months, candidates for City Councils and mayors of many cities in Brazil. Transmitted over the internet, these exchanges were recorded, to be available to interested parties, in ocandeeiro.org/eleicoes2024, on the Mutua University website.
Two issues were initially discussed in them: that of the Legislative Power, which is the one who, in our democratic State based on the rule of law, approves, by a majority of votes, the laws that authorize the Executive to act; and the usual disconnection of electoral campaigns for these two powers: parties focus their resources and voters' attention on choosing chief executives, and leave campaigns for councilors at the expense and risk of the candidates, from a personal perspective .
Thus, although they know that an executive that does not have majorities in the legislature can be completely immobilized in its action, they are not concerned with the election of these majorities.
We then came up with the proposal to build, in the legislative election, groups of candidates for the Chamber interconnected around a common plan of action. In other words, carrying out the campaigns of candidates for the legislature (councillors, deputies and senators) not as campaigns of people loose in the political space, with individual promises of political action, but uniting them around a common program with very clear objectives (a dozen, or a little more), that they elaborate collectively.
It is better, for electoral results, that such common programs are drawn up with popular participation, and even better if they coincide with those of the government program of the head of the executive that they intend to support.
With this, the voters themselves, who usually leave their choices for the Legislature until the last minute, because they do not value their power, could better choose their candidates: instead of choosing them only based on the qualities of each one and their promises, or due to their connection to their voters or to their territories of operation, they would choose among those most willing and best prepared to carry out the programs they prefer. And these collectives of candidates would naturally become, if elected, “collectives of mandates”, and “embryos” of the necessary parliamentary majorities.
This electoral proposal would be much more transformative than “collective mandates”, a welcome invention, but which does not facilitate the formation of parliamentary majorities: with their members gathered around a single parliamentarian, they tend to isolate themselves in political activity, in competition that is established between all parliamentarians – immersed as we are in the culture of opportunistic individualism and profiteering from the capitalist economic system that dominates the world.
And it would also be much more transformative than collectives of parties, necessary to form collectives of mandates, but insufficient to effectively build parliamentary majorities, necessarily diversified across the ideological spectrum of the parties.
In fact, this proposal was inspired by another, from not so distant times: that of a bill prepared by the Movement to Combat Electoral Corruption – MCCE, aimed at the serious problem of the increasingly worse quality and increasingly less representation of legislative houses in the Brazil, at all levels – which creates serious risks for our fragile democracy.
This project would be presented as a new Popular Law Initiative, based on the success of this movement with the law against vote buying in 1999 and, in 2010, the Clean Record law, as initiatives from society and not from the government, parliamentarians or parties.
In this project, the main change would be the election for the Legislature in two rounds, linking the choice of the people's representatives in that Branch to the government plans chosen by them, among those presented by the candidates for the Executive in the first round. It is known that it is up to the Legislature to also supervise the Executive, but the latter, in order to fulfill its promises, must have a majority in the Legislature that is at least close to that which it itself obtained.
And it was then with the collection of signatures for this already well-advanced Initiative that the MCCE had to interrupt it, in light of the process that led to the dismissal of President Dilma Rousseff – who, incidentally, viewed this proposal with great sympathy.
Unlike, however, the MCCE popular initiative, which if approved becomes a rule obeyed by everyone, the proposal made now depends directly on the political will of the candidates and, especially, the parties. But, if it is accepted, it will constitute a great step forward in overcoming these distortions in our electoral process, even as a first step towards the true electoral revolution of the MCCE Project, which we hope will be resumed, as it could be especially important for the 2026 elections.
A revolution that will, in fact, also be cultural, and although it will have the power of everything that comes from below, it will necessarily be slow and long, as it aims to overcome norms, practices and habits that have been ingrained for many decades in our democracy.
In fact, our parliaments have been increasingly invaded by what have long been called “pickaxes” – profiteers who are returning to using the less supervised vote buying to get elected. And that, once they have the enormous power of the Legislature, they blackmail the Executive for their own benefit or in defense of the interests of the companies and organizations that finance their campaigns.
We cannot, therefore, miss the opportunity that the next municipal elections offer us for these changes, even if radical, in our electoral practices. Even more so because it is at this level that professional political apprentices begin their solo flights. And, according to their abilities, they achieve what they want: belonging to the political class, in which they will not refuse all the temptations, which arise thanks to their proximity to public coffers and the power of the Executive, and which discredit our democracy so much.
*Chico Whitaker is an architect and social activist. He was councilor in São Paulo. He is currently a consultant to the Brazilian Commission for Justice and Peace.
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