As a disclaimer, this subject is worthy of books, not merely blog posts, and the comparison of numbers and statistics cross-referenced with historical studies and sociological analyses is beyond the scope of what I can or want to do here. Any numbers I'm basing my observations off of come from estimates from the Brazilian government and the CIA World Factbook.
I waited until the last moment to write this blog post because today, Sunday, October 26, was the final-round election for the Brazilian presidency and boy, has it been interesting. The results were just announced and the city is exploding with fireworks and screams. Brazil is a large-scale democracy, with a population of 200 million, and functions with a multi-party system. The presidential elections are done by run-off system (wow, throw back to AP Comp Gov here); in the first round, if no candidate receives a majority, a second round is held with the top two candidates. On October 5, in the first round, Dilma Rousseff, the sitting president who is with the ostensible-socialist Workers' Party, and Aécio Neves, a conservative candidate who received more votes than expected, advanced to a second round. Just now, official results show that Dilma won with just over 51.5% of the vote.
Some observations:
- I had to think really hard about what Dilma's last name was, because politicians just go by their first names. Part of the whole all-of-Brazil-is-an-extended-family thing.
- Dilma's politics over the past four years form the root of both why she was reelected and why Aécio, specifically, was the one to challenge her in such a close race. It's super complicated, but effectively, this was a presidential race between a pro-poor candidate and a pro-business/economics candidate. Aécio was going to cut the (huge) government and open the economy to stimulate growth; Dilma is probably going to keep doing what she was before the election, which was spending super heavily on the poor (I learned about her programs in my GW Economic Development class!) and driving the country into a recession. Just saw that Elliott is hosting an event to discuss what this vote means, but ultimately, it remains to be seen.
- This is where I'm speculating, but I'd bet the vote split, roughly, between people who benefit from Dilma's pro-poor spending or who sympathize with heavy pro-poor spending; and people who either are wealthier, familiar with international economics, or frustrated with Dilma's party in general and would never have voted in any candidate from her party.
- This is where it gets tricky. Most of the population in poverty in Brazil is non-white. This is complicated further by how race is defined here--by a scale of skin color: there are whites, "mixed," and blacks, as well as Asians (classified, socially, as whites) and indigenous. Even though Brazil is the country with the largest population of people of African descent outside of Africa, officially, only 7.6% of the population self-identifies as "black." 47.7% is white, and 43.1% is mixed. You can call yourself whatever you want if you're mixed: mulatto, light-skinned, café com leite…anything goes.
- Voting is mandatory here, which is also complicated (sensing a theme?) and many, many people have asked what it's like to live somewhere where that's not the case.
- Something that is not complicated: politics are not polarizing here. You don't vote by party alliance, neither candidate was very popular, and even if you vote differently than someone, even a family member (like in my host family), it's all chill in the end and everyone loves each other anyway. Which is awesome, and has been super cool to observe and to be allowed to sort-of-barely be a part of.
Overall, it has been incredibly interesting to be in Brazil as it is experiencing such an important political event. Being from the United States has enhanced this--a key part of the issue in the election was that Dilma was alienating American investors and explicitly was anti-Obama/America, and Aécio had planned to reopen the economy to America. Furthermore, the history of American political intervention and interference in the region made it tricky to share an opinion on the issues. But, at the same time, it has been an opportunity to observe how this country functions politically and how politics interacts with daily life. This is: very much, but at the end of the day, no one expected much to change, no matter who was elected. I'm not living with communities benefitting from Dilma's social programs, and international economics and business are not what most people think about on a daily basis. What do people really care about in politics? They really, I think, just wanted to get the election over with.