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BRAZIL: Growth in Female Political Representation – Slow To Motionless

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Oct 9 2006 (IPS) - Women in Brazil striving for a more gender-balanced participation in political power have a new frustration to deal with. The Oct. 1 elections put a stop to the slow, inadequate increase in female representation in Congress.

Only 45 women were elected to the Chamber of Deputies, just a few more than the 42 who were elected in the previous elections, in 2002. Women’s participation thus rose from 8.19 to 8.77 percent.

In the Senate, where one-third of the 81 seats were up for grabs, the results were better, with four new women senators, but the proportion is the same as four years ago, at 14.81 percent of the total.

“There have been setbacks” with respect to the 2002 elections, when the number of women deputies rose by 45 percent, Natalia Mori, the co-director of the non-governmental Feminist Centre for Studies and Advisory Services (CFEMEA), which supports public policies and laws of interest to women, told IPS.

In 2002, only five out of the 27 Brazilian states had no woman representative in the lower house of Congress, a number that has risen to eight, she said. And there were some “important losses,” as some of the leaders of the women’s parliamentary bloc were not reelected, such as Iara Bernardi and Luci Choinacki, both of the leftist governing Workers’ Party (PT).

Other women stood for different positions and were unsuccessful, as in the case of deputy Jandira Feghali, of the Brazilian Communist Party, who ran for a Senate seat for the state of Rio de Janeiro. Pre-election polls awarded her an ample lead, but she eventually lost, in spite of receiving 37.4 percent of the valid votes.

Her surprise defeat by Francisco Dornelles of the conservative Progressive Party was attributed to a campaign by members of the Catholic Church in Rio, who accused her of advocating “total liberation of abortion.” Pamphlets called on citizens to “vote for life,” and said that Feghali’s views were equivalent to “killing defenceless children.”

The leftwing coalition supporting her candidacy persuaded the electoral court to order a search for pamphlets in the Archdiocese of Rio de Janeiro. Although the search came up with nothing, it aggravated the confrontation two weeks before the elections. Another request, for the court to ban preaching against the candidate in the churches, was denied.

Feghali, who will hold her seat in the Chamber of Deputies until February, acknowledged that she had lost key votes due to the religious campaign, which intensified on the eve of the elections with the sending of messages to thousands of cellphones.

The reason for the conservative attack on the lawmaker is that she is proposing a draft law which, while it does not legalise abortion, does seek to decriminalise it so that the public health system can treat women suffering from the consequences of clandestine abortions, which are the cause of thousands of deaths.

Abortion is a crime in Brazil – except in cases of rape or when the mother’s life is in danger – and that prevents women seeking treatment for its after-effects in the public health service, the only health care to which poor women have access. This contributes to the high maternal mortality rate.

These facts were stressed by the non-governmental organisation Catholics for a Free Choice, in support of Feghali, “who as a member of parliament has taken the demands of the women’s movement seriously.” As Feghali is a medical doctor, she was an obvious choice to introduce the draft law to treat abortion complications as a public health problem.

This particular battle of the senatorial candidate is a good illustration of one of the obstacles faced by the movement for more women’s participation in positions of political power. Reproductive and sexual rights are rejected as a feminist cause by religious and conservative sectors, and have even divided the women’s block in parliament, which on other matters acts in unison.

But the movement did celebrate some victories in the Oct. 1 elections. Five women will be disputing state governorships in the runoff election on Oct. 29, some of them as the favourite candidate.

Manuela d’Ávila, a 25-year-old journalist and sociology student, was elected as a Communist Party deputy with the highest number of votes in the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul. She will have the political capital to represent young women and to demand parliamentary renewal, Mori said.

Other female candidates also chalked up excellent results in the elections, indicating that the women’s caucus may be able to improve its “qualitative performance” over the next electoral period, even if the number of women deputies remains about the same..

The parliamentary women’s struggle is linked up with the fight for affirmative action in favour of other social groups who “face greater difficulties” in conquering political participation, such as Afro-Brazilians and indigenous people, Mori acknowledged. Ethnic minorities are not even included in the official statistics, so the history of their representation in Congress cannot be monitored, she noted.

The disappointing results of the last elections confirm, in the view of activists, the need for electoral reform, like the one adopted in Argentina in the early 1990s, in order to effectively provide women with an increased share of political decision-making posts.

Public financing of election campaigns, so that women can compete on equal terms financially, and voting for “closed” party lists, are essential conditions, according to Almira Rodrigues, a CFEMEA researcher.

But the candidates would have to be listed alternately by sex, so that women also occupy places high on the party lists and could thus effectively be elected, she said. If parity is the aim, each male candidate would be followed by a female one, and vice versa. If a one-third quota for women is agreed, there would be two male candidates for every woman.

Brazilians vote not for parties, but for individual candidates, identified by number. Therefore, not much came of the quota law passed in 1997, which states that 30 percent of the candidates of any given party be women.