Brazil: Eying a New System

Brazil’s doughty President Humberto Castello Branco is caught in a bind. He has promised to hold gubernatorial elections in eleven states (out of 22) in October and a presidential election next year; his revolution, he says, “is not afraid of the ballot box.” But because Castello Branco has a scruple against outlawing the opposition, one of the contenders for votes will be the Brazilian Labor Party, the power behind the inflationist, leftist regime that Castello Branco overthrew last year. The President is counting on electoral courts to use the new Ineligibilities Law to keep off the ballot candidates that he considers genuinely undesirable.

Last week came the first test. In Guanabara state (Rio), a five-party coalition built around the Brazilian Labor Party had supported for governor retired Army Marshal Henrique Teixeira Lott, 70, who has repeatedly denounced the revolution as “undemocratic.” Many Brazilians assumed that the government would trump up a charge to disqualify him. Instead, a state electoral court found a perfectly legal reason: Lott had thoughtlessly transferred his voting registration to another state. The opposition parties now seem set to pick a friendlier foe.

Castello Branco’s cause fared less well in the state of Minas Gerais. There the government sought to have Sebastião Paes de Almeida, 53, a multimillionaire industrialist-turned-politician, thrown out of the gubernatorial race for “abuse of economic power”—his legendary largesse at election time has earned him the nickname “Tião,” after a famed Brazilian train robber. The state electoral court refused to cancel Paes de Almeida’s candidacy. “If that section of the law does not apply to him,” grumbled one Castello Branco aide, “we might as well rip it up.”

Many supporters of Castello Branco feel that something more than merely the Ineligibilities Law will indeed be needed to keep his government in power after next year’s presidential election. That something is to change Brazil’s form of government from presidential to parliamentary, replacing direct election of the President with indirect election by Congress. In such an election, the choice almost certainly would fall on Castello Branco. Until now, he has resisted the change. Last week, with Castello Branco’s blessing, a congressional commission began studying a constitutional reform that could open the door to a parliamentary system, and it became a serious possibility.