Elections 101: Lessons from Brazil 2010

Our Brazilian interests were non-political--the classical guitar music of Heitor Villa-lobos, introduced to us by Joan Baez via her soprano rendition of his Bachianas Brasileiras (she trills in our mind every now and then), the bossa nova treats from Antonio Carlos Jobim, and the world-watched mighty Amazon river. 

Until Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva came along, and soon we were watching him preside over the Federative Republic of Brazil as president from 2002 until the end of this year, and in the process got to see them win the plums to host Copa Mundial 2014 and the Summer Olympics 2016.  Those two world games alone speak of the high Brazilian profile in the international scene, and a robust economic growth that spawned a social development program, which is believed to have largely benefited the country's poor.

On October 03, Brazil went to the polls to elect from among three contenders their next president:


Dilma Rousseff of the Workers Party (PT), Jose Serra of the Brazilian Social Democratic Party (PSDB), and Marina Silva of the Green Party (PV).

Rousseff was a career civil servant, an economist.  She was Lula's energy minister before she became his chief of staff.   Lula called her the "mother of PAC," his flagship economic development program.  She was a student activist, and got imprisoned for three years because she was involved with the underground resistance to the military dictatorship that ruled Brazil in 1964-1985.

Serra lost to Lula in the run-off for the presidency in 2002. He's a big name in Brazil politics: he'd been mayor of the biggest city, and governor of the biggest and wealthiest state, both named Sao Paulo, became a senator, and was planning minister before Lula's tenure. He was head of the National Students' Union during the military coup in 1964; he went to exile in Chile and the United States, where he studied economics, and returned in 1977 when civilian government was restored. He was among the founders of his political party.

Silva was Lula's environment minister from January 2003 until she left government in May 2008. She worked with rainforest activist Chito Mendes, who was murdered in 1988.

Lula and the three contenders had interesting social backgrounds. Rousseff was from a middle-class family, her father a Bulgarian immigrant; Serra came from a poor family of Italian immigrants, and Silva, daughter of rubber-tappers, was illiterate until she was 14 years old.

Lula, as everybody now knows, came from a poor, illiterate peasant family, who learned to read when he was ten.  He became a metal worker in Sao Paulo, a trade union activist, headed the Metalworkers' Union in 1975, and spearheaded the founding of the Workers' Party in 1980, the first major left-wing socialist political party of Brazil.  He ran for the presidency four times before he won by landslide in 2002.

Rousseff was the favorite to win the presidency, and with Lula's support, she got 46.91% of the popular vote against Serra's 32.61% and Silva's 19.33%.

Brazilians will go back to the polls on 31 October for the run-off to finally chose between Rousseff and Serra who will take over the Planalto--the presidential office--from Lula on 01 January, 2011.  Constitutionally, the winner must garner at least 50% of the votes to become president.

This early, the prediction is that Rousseff will be the first female president of Brazil. She would be the seventh Latin American woman to be elected head of state after Violeta Chamorro (Nicaragua, 1990), Rosalia Arteaga Serrano (Ecuador, 1997), Mireya Moscoso (Panama, 1999), Michelle Bachelet (Chile, 2006), Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner (Argentina, 2007), and Laura Chinchilla (Costa Rica, 2010).

The October 2010 election events in Brazil impart some important lessons for democratic states like the Philippines in the conduct of elections ---

1.  The election results were promptly known, may be because the process is not loaded with the election of officials of local government units; 

2.  There's very high confidence on their system and counting procedures; there were no problems that hassled first-time users of computerized systems;
3.   There's a very clear-cut ideological definition among the vying parties; the incumbent and the favorite-to-win political party is leftist and socialist;
4.   It appears that religious groups/sects there know the operational definition of 'separation of church and state', and candidates do not woo religious bloc votes;
5.   The incumbent won his tenure as president without question as to its legality or constitutionality; he knows he can not return for a third term, but he did agitate for changes in their charter nor run for state governor or senator just to remain in the circle of power.

Sources:

1.   "Profile: Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva". (2010, January 28).  BBC News.  Retrieved from http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/5346744.stm

2.   "Brazil election race". (2010, October 04).  BBC News Latin America & Carribean. Retrieved from http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10461959