Editorial

A Historical Reconciliation on the Left and the Movements to Define the First Electoral Round

The death of Queen Elizabeth will give President Jair Bolsonaro, who remains stuck in second place after former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in every poll, an opportunity to get away for a while and maybe drive down his high rates of rejection among voters. Bolsonaro has confirmed that he will attend the Queen’s funeral on Monday. For a president who has been unable to secure high-profile friendships—or even notably positive working relations—with any world leader aside from former president Donald Trump, being seen at the historic ceremony for Britain’s longest-serving monarch might serve both international and domestic political ends. It remains unlikely, however, that the trajectory of the race in Brazil will be much changed by the fact that Bolsonaro has decided to pay his respects to the royal family in person. This is simply not a big enough event in the lives of most Brazilians to force a shift in the campaign. 

Lula’s campaign is also trying to nudge the race in a new direction, one that makes an outright victory for the former president more likely, thus sparing the country an even more contentious run-off between center, center-left, and left-wing forces on one hand and right-wing and far right forces on the other. Direct appeals to voters currently intending to support ex-Ceará governor Ciro Gomes and Senator Simone Tebet have started emanating from Lula campaign surrogates. In a recent video produced by Lula’s team, for example, former soccer star Raí, urges voters to back the former president in the first round of voting “so that the world has no doubts about who we really are.” Foreign perception of Brazil is obviously not the main issue in this election for most voters, but international opinion does matter to lots of Brazilians. Raí also appealed directly to Ciro and Tebet voters, calling on them to set aside hard feelings before it is too late.

The strongest example of this magnanimity, aside from former São Paulo governor Geraldo Alckmin joining Lula’s ticket earlier this year, came this week when Marina Silva appeared alongside Lula to support his candidacy. Marina was a longtime member of Lula’s Workers’ Party (PT), serving in his cabinet as environmental minister after many years of activism in the Amazon alongside Chico Mendes, a hero of the Brazilian labor movement for rural workers in the rainforest. Marina grew apart from the PT over the past decade or so, running strong campaigns against Dilma in 2010 and 2014 before fading in the 2018 race. Her decision to support Lula sends an important signal about the importance of defeating Bolsonaro and may assist the former president in his ongoing outreach to evangelical voters among whom the incumbent retains a sizeable advantage. 

There is some concern that a more aggressive preemptive attempt to peel off Ciro and Tebet voters who might be inclined to support Lula in a run-off could backfire. Some in Ciro’s Democratic Labor Party, for example, have started calling for the party to remain neutral in a potential second-round race between Lula and Bolsonaro. Ciro himself has said his followers will know how to vote, insinuating they will not back the incumbent. But that may be beyond his control if he continues hammering Lula and Bolsonaro in equal measure. Ciro and his party insist he will remain in the race until the first round of voting on October 2. Whether he will grow in the polls before then, remain just below double-digits, or shed support as voters opt for more viable alternatives will be a crucial dynamic to watch.

Highlights

• POLITICAL VIOLENCE. In the latest example of rising political violence ahead of the upcoming election, a supporter of former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of the Workers’ Party was brutally murdered on September 7, Independence Day in Brazil by a Bolsonaro supporter in the central-western state of Mato Grosso. According to police reports, Rafael Silva de Oliveira, 24, killed Benedito Cardoso dos Santos, 42, by striking him with an ax after tempers frayed over political differences. Uncannily similar to the killing of the Workers’ Party’s local official Marcelo Arruda on July 9, this incident is a testament to the sort of political violence and polarization that is to come in the buildup of this year's election. Responding to the murder of his supporter, Lula suggested that law enforcement investigate whether such attacks “had been ordered, guided, or were part of a political strategy.”

• UNLAWFUL CAMPAIGNING. Responding to actions presented by multiple parties against President Bolsonaro of the Liberal Party, specifically those by Lula of the Workers’ Party and Soraya Thronicke of the Brazil Union, Minister ​​Benedito Gonçalves of the Superior Electoral Court (TSE) prohibited the incumbent from using images taken during the September 7th Independence celebrations in electoral campaign ads. The minister has set a fine of R$ 10,000 in the event that Bolsonaro’s campaign does not comply and explained his actions by stating that Bolsonaro used “…the position of the Head of State, on an occasion inaccessible to any of the other competitors, to project the image of his candidacy, making people believe that the presence of thousands of people on the Esplanada dos Ministérios, with the purpose of commemorating the civic date, was the result of electoral mobilization in support of the candidate’s reelection."

• SOLUTIONS FOR DEMOCRACY IN THE U.S. Amid growing fears of a Bolsonaro coup, members of the U.S. Congress are increasingly pushing to support democratic institutions in Brazil. On September 7th, Bernie Sanders (Democrat, Vermont) unveiled a resolution that, if passed, would force the government of President Joe Biden to immediately recognize the result of the election in Brazil and suspend relations with its southern neighbor in the event of a coup. “The United States and Brazil are two of the largest democracies in the Western Hemisphere. At a time when democracy is under attack in Brazil, in America, and in countries around the world, we have a duty to stand up for people’s fundamental right to shape their futures by having a voice in their government, without fear of political violence or retribution,” said Senator Kaine, a vocal supporter of Sanders’s bill. After meeting with a delegation of Brazilian civil society entities led by the Washington Brazil Office over the summer, Sanders announced his intention to further push this motion once the Senate returned from its summer recess. 

• DATAFOLHA POLL. A recent poll released by the Datafolha institute this Thursday, September 15, shows Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva leading with 45% of intended votes in the first-round runoff. Trailing behind is the incumbent Jair Bolsonaro of the Liberal Party with 33%, Ciro Gomes of the Democratic Labor Party with 8%, and Simone Tebet of the Brazilian Democratic Movement with 5%. In the case of a second-round, “third-way” voters seem to prefer Lula, with 54% of intended votes, over Bolsonaro, who would have 38%. 

Feature Article

LGBTQIA+ Candidates Remain Invisible in Electoral Justice

On August 16th, I received the Nexo newsletter with an article entitled “Record of Diversity.” I then accessed the Folha de São Paulo report on the same topic, that noted the unprecedented increase in women and Black candidates in this year's national elections. I was immediately frustrated by the blatant silence about lesbian, gay, bisexual, transvestite, transgender, queer, intersex, asexual and other non-heterosexual and non-cisgender (LGBTQIA+) candidates in these stories.

From there, I went directly to the database of the Superior Electoral Court (TSE) to verify whether the lack of coverage about these candidacies was a result of the reports themselves or a failure of the official government body. I discovered, however, that the responsibility for the gap in information had not been poor journalism, although the author had not written anything about the issue, even though the title of the article was “Record of Diversity.”

The TSE information that allows one to analyze the presence of vulnerable groups among candidates for public office includes the following categories: gender, color/race, age group, people with disabilities and social name. Therefore, it is possible to know how many women, Blacks, Indigenous people, young people, elderly people, and people with disabilities are candidates. The information on “social names,” which would come the closest in referring to LGBTQIA+ people and could indicate the number of trans people who are running for office in 2022, is incomplete because not every trans person uses their new social name as a result of the Supreme Court decision of 2018, which allows people to change their given name in public registries without the need for surgery or a court order. Thus, there is actually no information regarding the sexual orientation and gender identity of this year’s candidates.

The absence of such data produces undesirable effects, among them is the invisibility of this profile of candidates. Such inconspicuousness poses obstacles to researchers and social movement activists, who have made efforts to record the segment's presence in articles and reports. National networks and organizations that are part of the movement, such as the Brazilian Association of Gays, Lesbians, Bisexuals, Transvestites, Transexuals and Intersex People (ABGLT), the National Alliance of Lesbians, Gays, Bisexuals, Transvestites, Transgendered, Transexual and Intersex People (Aliança Nacional LGBTI+); the National Association of Trans (ANTRA); and Vote LGBT, among others, have sought to map these candidacies through the preparation of virtual forms and the dissemination of reports, which are the result of the surveys that they conducted.

However, due to the limits of communication and survey methods, the numbers are often different from one network to another. Gustavo Gomes da Costa Santos from the Federal University of Pernambuco and Pedro Barbabela from the Federal University of Minas Gerais have developed important analyses about LGBTQIA+ candidates in Brazil, with articles in research journals on the subject. In these publications, they reflect on these difficulties in obtaining the real number of “colorful” candidacies in the country.

The challenges perceived by activists and academics could be easily resolved if candidates' sexual orientation and gender identity were declared by political parties when they present their candidates to the TSE. In addition, this would make this population more visible in party organizations, which are also full of barriers and contradictions regarding the LGBTQIA+ population.

Among the undesirable effects of this statistical indiscernibility is the social and political invisibility that the LGBTQIA+ movement has struggled to address for many decades in artistic, cultural, and media narrative disputes. For more than two decades, the movement has also been active through organizing massive Pride Parades in the capitals and other towns and cities throughout the country. Numerical invisibility, however, hinders inclusionary policies, whether they seek to involve excluded groups in decision-making spaces or in initiatives against political violence that target LGBTQIA+ candidates and elected officials.

The interview given by TSE President Luiz Edson Fachin to the transgender teacher and activist Jaqueline Gomes de Jesus, which was published in the Revista Brasileira de Estudos da Homocultura (REBEH) for a thematic dossier on LGBTQIA+ political participation that I coordinated with other researchers in the social sciences, notes that in 2019 the TSE established a working group, the Systematization of Electoral Norms. One of the themes was the participation of minorities in the electoral process. There was an LGBTQIA+ working subgroup with the participation of the ABGLT and the National LGBTI+ Alliance, which recommended developing appropriate terminology, discussing theoretical and political bases for the electoral court's regulations, and training polling station officials and employees of the TSE. 

As a result of the interaction between the civil society and the State, Resolution 23659/21 was approved, which deals with electoral registration, providing for the use of social names and alternative gender identities, as well as the unenforceability of discharging trans women from the military. It also includes the possibility of filling in the names of two mothers or two fathers in official forms, which has been a way to strengthen the possibility of recognizing homo-parental families. However, regarding the fight against political violence toward LGBTQIA+ people, the president of the TSE only mentioned the effort to combat fake news that the Electoral Court has been carrying out.

These are important measures that reveal greater openness of the electoral judicial system to the participation of the LGBTQIA+ population, but it is still insufficient for the promotion of the political rights in the elections for this segment of Brazilian society. We need to advance the institutionalization of electoral policies so that they truly include these subjects in political disputes, with a focus on encouraging LGBTQIA+ people to run for political office; participate in government management; ensure the material conditions of these candidacies through the public funding of electoral campaigns, currently controlled by political parties; effectively protect LGBTQIA+ people from political violence; and commit to the visibility of sexual and gender diversity in political institutions. This is why it is important to know the official number of LGBTQIA+ candidates in guaranteeing electoral justice and expanding Brazilian democracy.

Cleyton Feitosa is a doctoral candidate in political science at the University of Brasilia, with a Master’s degree in human rights from the Federal University of Pernambuco. He is the author LGBT Public Policies and Democratic Construction in Brazil and a member of the Resocie Research Group – Rethinking the Relations between Society and State at the Institute of Political Science at the Federal University of Brasilia.

This article was prepared for the Election Observatory 2022 project, an initiative of the Institute for Democracy and Democratization of Communication. Based at the Federal University of Minas Gerais, with the participation of research groups from several Brazilian universities. For more information, see: www.observatoriodaseleicoes.com.br.

The Portuguese version was published on Mídia Ninja and is available here

Feature articles express the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the editors or WBO.