Campaign financing

What could Jarbas Vasconcelos, Raul Henri, Raul Jungeman, André Campos, Mendoncinha, Augusto Coutinho, Daniel Coelho, etc. possibly have in common? Nothing and everything. Nothing if you, the reader, consider the nominal differences in terms of political affiliation, platform, political history, and party.

On the other hand, everything is absurd when you consider the difficulty of financing election campaigns this year. There's a candidate who switched parties, eyeing the promise of funding. Another threatened not to run if the promised money didn't materialize, and who, until recently, was systematically opposed to the PSB (Brazilian Socialist Party), now appears silent, mute, shrinking on the Socialist Party's platform. What can one expect from such a self-serving party system? – Absence of criticism and opposition. We are living through ungrateful times for Brazilian multi-party democracy, always accused of being corrupt and susceptible to enticement by the Executive Branch (whether state or federal). But what we are seeing is the decline of parties worthy of the name. If candidates sell their support – whichever side it may be – to a party or candidate of the moment, owner of a rich campaign fund, what sense would this democracy have with 37 or 38 parties registered with the Electoral Court?

It's a veritable marketplace of candidacies, alliances, party labels and sub-lists, television time, etc. Instead of a public sphere, animated by communicative and republican rationality, a source of political will based on public debate, argumentative processes, evidence and counter-evidence, what we have is a marketplace of party labels, without principles, without public aims, mere springboards for "certain village personalities," whose only political asset has been visibility in the media, in mass communication, and nothing more. They are rhetorical statesmen, actors who play a role designed to convince a floating electorate that they are in favor of their prejudices, their stereotypes, their common sense.

All of this wouldn't be so serious if we weren't on the eve of a presidential election. How can we unmask these terrible actors, understand their real motivations, the interests they represent, who finances them, and what the consequences of electoral fraud and deception will be for Brazilian society?

It's as if strategic discourse has taken over electoral rhetoric, and those aspiring to public office are urged to say and promise everything they don't believe in or oppose. And this in the name of God, the Church, family, good morals, and so on. We are in a vast supermarket of sophisms, fallacies, ready-made ideas, at the disposal of anyone who wants to win an election. Then, it's a blank check. The elected official considers himself the possessor of a credit title that can be cashed according to his convenience, without having to give the slightest explanation to the voter.

At this point, the fundamental principle of "presumption of innocence" prevents the Electoral Court from blocking, suspending, or revoking candidacies and parties before the elections. Once elected, we try to mitigate the damage, hoping that a conviction will be handed down before the end of the term or the next election.

What can be said is that, given the accumulation of mysteries and unanswered questions about the financing of electoral campaigns that pile up sky-high, the current elections can only take place under suspicion. Nobody knows who the candidate is voting for, what they believe in, what they say or will do. It's Plato's cave in the floodplain of greater Recife.