There is no such abstraction as the will of society or what society wants. Society is many things and how is that decided? The fact that we don't have a Congress that reflects the characteristics of our population has a lot to do with the electoral rules that end up favoring candidates who have more access to money to finance political campaigns, which are very expensive in Brazil.
What does it mean to be representative? When we think of like this "being representative is being similar to the Brazilian population ", in fact we could solve this easily, we could make a congress by lottery, we would have a congress that is equal in terms of demographic composition to the Brazilian population. But the idea of political representation is not exactly the same as the idea of representativeness in the demographic sense of the term.
The idea of political representation presupposes that there is a relationship between citizens, voters and the people to whom they delegate or pass on a specific political mission. But the political conflict in the world today is not just about that. Many of the issues that come up in politics today, the most controversial issues, have less to do with what people think and more to do with who people are.
It's not that politics has to be equal, that politicians have to be equal to society, but they can't be completely different either. And in this respect, Brazilian political representation leaves a lot to be desired. Especially since the 2018 elections, we have had the system that is still in force today, which gains strength with each election, in which both parties and elections are financed by donations from individuals, which are still valid, but above all by an ever-increasing volume of public funds destined for the party fund, which has grown a lot in this period, so it's already at more than a billion reais a year, which is distributed among the parties, but above all by the creation of the electoral fund, called Special Election Financing Fund, popularly known as Big Electoral Fund, which has multiplied in value.
It started with 1. 7 billion, then went up to 4 billion, 6 billion. This, on the one hand, can be positive because it limits the influence of the economic elite or sectors of the economy on political activity, but, on the other hand, the fact that it is so large and sufficient to finance party activities and electoral campaigns means that our parties and candidates don't need to engage voters to guarantee the financing of their activities.
These public resources come from electoral funds, which tend to reinforce electoral inequalities. Parties that already have more votes end up gaining more than parties that have fewer votes. This produces a wheel that turns by itself.
You have a very small group of candidates, who have access to a lot of resources, a lot of visibility, and a group of almost 80% of the candidates, who before the elections we can say have practically zero chance of being elected. And speaking specifically of the Brazilian system, I think that funding is, was, is and will continue to be the main bottleneck. If money becomes a very important variable for getting elected, and since we have a very unequal country, this inequality is reflected in gender and color.
Because Brazil, for example, doesn't have few black candidates. The problem is that these candidacies don't receive resources, they don't receive electoral TV time and they stay there feeding white candidacies. There have been a number of initiatives over time to try to increase the chances of women and black people being elected in our political system.
We've had electoral affirmative action since at least the 1990s, initially aimed at women. Brazil doesn't actually have quotas in the legislature. It has some complex quotas that apply to bodies other than elected representatives, so to speak.
So, first, you have a mechanism of quotas in the nominations, that is, quotas in the lists of candidates that the parties or federations present. 30% of the resources of the public campaign financing fund, the Special Election Financing Fund, have to be allocated to finance women's candidacies. The fact of being able to allocate resources to women candidates for the executive branch has opened doors for women governors to be elected, mayors of important cities or competitive candidates to have their candidacies financed, when before perhaps the parties wouldn't have prioritized this.
But we've seen parties putting money into one candidate for president or two candidates for state governments and saying, "I've met my quota for funding women candidates". Is that what we want or not? There are many parties in Brazil, for example, where the bulk of funding for female candidates ends up going to the wives, mothers and daughters of traditional politicians.
Regarding race, we don't have quotas in the nominations. The rule we have is the following: if a party launches 10% black and brown candidates, then these candidates have to have access to at least 10% of public funding and at least 10% of TV time. This racial funding quota is even more complicated.
Firstly, because a party may not have any black candidates, and if it doesn't have any black candidates, it doesn't have to apply any of these quotas. And secondly, because between elections, parties are granted amnesty for not obeying this rule. Some candidates end up managing to circumvent this barrier that money imposes.
So, if you're a celebrity, for example, a former soccer player, a singer. . .
Another group are candidates who represent an electoral base that has a strong collective identity. Another segment that has been very effective in this process are religious leaders. More recently, we've also seen this from various categories linked to public security forces.
I would also add a category which is candidates who have sufficient resources to finance their own campaigns. And perhaps the most obvious example of this is the case of Agriculture. The distrust that the average Brazilian has of politics and this feeling of a lack of representation, which is widespread and which you see in everyone's speech when you talk about politics, can only be tackled when one decides to take part in politics.
Because politics isn't just about voting and decisions that are made in parliament, politics is about values, values of tolerance. When we talk about representation or the quality of policies, and I say that a good policy is a policy that arises from a process of deliberation, from a conversation between two people and from reaching a middle ground between these two things. This implies, one, that I'm going to listen to the person on the other side who thinks differently from me and that I'm going to be able, by listening to that person, to think about how we, together, can build something that is different but still good.
That's politics.
