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?