Party cheat sheet

I can’t even remember when I first saw a headline speculating about the alliances in this year’s presidential election. I do remember the headline, however: the PMDB wanted the governorship of São Paulo state in exchange for a political alliance. I also remember that this was before the PSDB had a candidate for president and before that party had committed against any alliance that involved the governorship of S.P.

Backing up, I think it would be worthwhile to give a bit of a down-and-dirty explanation of Brazilian political parties. As I mentioned earlier, Brazil is increasingly a two-party country where the “minor” parties can have a major impact. The two major parties are the left-of-center PT (the Workers’ Party) and the somewhat-less-left-of-center PSDB. Both parties are essential socially progressive while their fiscal policies are neo-Liberal. Both parties have their roots in the opposition to the last dictatorship (1964-1985) although the demographics of the founders are significantly different. The PSDB’s founders were mostly post-dictatorship defectors from the MDB (a party created by the dictators as the “opposition party”) who had held important political and intellectual posts in government (particularly the state government of São Paulo) and at universities. The PT, meanwhile, grew out of the massive labor movement (also based in greater São Paulo) of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Other founders of the PT included liberation theologists, left-wing intellectuals and people active in the guerilla movement that sought to undermine the dictatorship.

Perhaps because of these historical differences, there is still a fairly active left wing of the PT even as many of the more committed socialists, communists and anti-Liberalism segments have left the party for more progressive pastures. Even though some of the most prominent members of the PSDB have firmly leftist histories, they seem less likely to voice opposition to party positions. A very crude reason for this might be that certain economic models (underdevelopment, neo-Marxism, dependency theory) have gone out of fashion in academia (significant for a party where not a few prominent members are former sociologists and economists) and it is frankly very difficult if not impossible to govern a country that is controlled by the IMF without adopting neo-Liberal policies.

Anyway, after the last round of municipal elections, it was widely reported that Brazil was increasingly a country dominated by the PSDB and the PT; these two parties have occupied the Alvorada (the presidential palace) for nearly 12 years and they now represent a vast majority of mayors in Brazil. Still, neither party holds a majority in any state legislature (that I can think of) or the national congress. This can lead to interesting twists. For instance, even though the PSDB holds the most seats in the São Paulo state legislature and had held the presidency of that body, the PFL managed to take it away last year by allying a broad base of opposition legislators.

Which party is powerful varies from state to state, but two parties that are sort of gold-chip alliances on the national level are the PMDB and the PFL. Here I must disclose that I cannot speak objectively of the ultraconservative PFL, which is particularly powerful in the Northeast and North. My objection, I think, is that many of the party’s principals are former bigwigs in ARENA, the ruling party of the aforementioned dictatorship. I guess I find it remarkable that these guys who were nominated governor by the dictators or elected senator for the military party survived the dictatorship and have remained successful via populist strategies. Perhaps some of them deserve to be elected, but I wish their histories as stooges of a fascist government were more of an issue. We all, I feel, make choices; I think that a politician should answer to scrutiny if that choice is to ally one’s self with a non-democratic government that tortures and murders its citizens, abrogates free speech and amasses a debt that will cripple the country for decades to come.

Besides the PFL, the PMDB holds significant political power in Brazil, particularly in rural states. As you might have guessed, the PMDB grew out of the MDB, which was the party created by the military as the opposition party during the dictatorship.

I’m sure that this sounds funny—my mention of the dictators “creating” the ARENA and the MDB the year after their 1964 coup but that’s exactly what happened. I have seen the actual news reports from when this happened. The government literally made a list of all of the legal political parties in Brazil and declared that certain parties would now become part of the ARENA and other parties would become part of the MDB. In this way, they created a two-party system although there remained significant rifts in both parties that would ultimately lead to the extinction of the ARENA in the early 1980s and the significant 1988 split of the PMDB that led to the creation of the PSDB. This is important because the PSDB took much of the left wing of the PMDB and left a more rural, centrist (or even right-of-center) party. Even as I say that, the PMDB has a strong social democratic current in part because various politicians of the left have defected to the PMDB. The PMDB, along with some more populist parties, is a great example of why “traditional” European and North American ideas of left and right do not fit neatly into many Latin American parties.

There are many other political parties, some of which have significant power in one or more states. Still, these are the four that will determine who is elected president this year. Their alliances will also probably determine the outcomes of several gubernatorial elections.

How´s that for a quick, dirty and probably inaccurate cheat sheet?

Money Matters: Journalism, Elections and Politics

I had set out this morning to try to untangle the complexities of multiparty systems, particularly Brazil’s, which is not unlike Israel’s: there are two dominant parties but the smaller parties (some of which are quite major) play very important roles both in elections of executives and in which party controls state and federal houses of congress.

But either my brain is not yet ready to go into the complexities of parties and alliances or I was truly stricken by the headline on today’s Folha de São Paulo. It read:

Gastos do governo sobem 14,5% no 1º tri

SHEILA D'AMORIM
DA SUCURSAL DE BRASÍLIA

Os gastos do governo federal cresceram 14,5% nos três primeiros meses de 2006, ano eleitoral, segundo dados divulgados ontem pelo Tesouro Nacional.

Roughly translated, this would mean:

Government expenditures rise 14.5% in 1^st quarter

The federal government´s expenditures rose 14.5% in the first three months of 2006 (an election year), according to statistics released yesterday by the Treasury.

Headlines like this are not remotely rare in Brazil. In fact, all newspapers and television news programs run this kind of story several times every month. Every other year you get this exact headline—stories linking rising government expenditures to elections. This particular story talked about increased spending in national programs—general social services, the “Bolsa-Família” (a public assistance program that provides food to the working poor), the central bank and various ministries (equivalent to government departments in the U.S.) for discretional spending. Of course, tomorrow’s front page will probably declare that the budget surplus for the federal, state and local governments in March reached a record high. The media will most likely not tie the record surplus to the increased spending.

During municipal elections, these kinds of headlines might note increased expenditures in municipalities where the mayor is from a party of the ruling party or coalition. Between election years, journalists will look in particular states and towns, examining government-funded programs and linking them to areas where certain parties are in power. This is because in Brazil there is always the sense that no government programs are funded without an eye to elections. All such allocations, they feel, are tied to electoral politics. The idea is that such funding rewards people who elect the ruling party and demonstrate to the losers that they, too, could have their piece of the pie if only they would elect the right woman or man.

In the U.S., such stories may seem crude or tacky. Analysts think that stories like this might make the electorate angry and cause a backlash against the government. Most importantly, U.S. Americans like to deny that there is a direct connection between budget allocations and electoral politics. It is therefore almost unheard of for journalists to carefully sift through all government programs and link where they are spent to the particular districts of certain partisans. You occasionally see this done for one politician—there will be stories about a congressman who is particularly effective at bringing money to his district—but it is not nearly so common. Newspapers do not have dozens of front-page stories every year about how much the government is spending and where and how this might be related to electoral politics. In Brazil, there would be lead stories on the evening news if the government decided to eliminate funding of Indian Health Service clinics off of reservations even though 64% of all American Indians do not live on reservations. Journalists would tie these cuts to defense spending and to the lack of political power that American Indians have (and their party politics). In the United States, this happens without notice.

I am not saying that the Brazilian way is better, but it is certainly different. Brazilians living in the United States find U.S. American journalism to be mediocre at best and irresponsible at worst. U.S. Americans in Brazil are shocked to see that Brazilian politicians fund public programs based on votes.

This is, of course, why I find it so important for people to learn different languages and to travel to other countries: so that they can learn about different perspectives.

As a beginning.

For some time, I have had a private blog that is basically only visible to four real-world friends. There is nothing wrong with this, but I have a number of online contacts from flickr who might possibly be interested in my thoughts. or not. There's also my family, which doesn't know about the other blog.

My idea is to have several linked blogs that address different interests: film, brazilian news and politics and other random tidbits.

This blog is for musings on Brazilian news and politics. Not that anyone probably cares, but it occurs to me that international media coverage of Brazilian news is usually nonexistent or gives a very limited picture of what is going on. In this election year, I thought I'd start my own blog where I review the Portuguese-language news or what I am hearing from the people around me.