Is another legislature possible?

The current national political news of the last few weeks, focused almost exclusively on President Lula's confrontation with the current Congress, is leading many to ask why this is happening. Would it be possible to have a Legislative Branch that did not create so many obstacles to the fulfillment of the campaign promises of the candidate elected to head the Executive Branch?

In reality, the Chamber of Deputies, in conjunction with the Senate, is attempting to impose on the country not what the people expected when electing Lula, but what the majorities in the Legislative branch would aim for if they were governing the country: that it remain divided in two, with privileged minorities at the top and poor majorities living in misery at the bottom. This is completely different – ​​and antagonistic – to the construction of the egalitarian and just society that Lula promised to engage in during his campaign.

We know that we live in a democratic state governed by the rule of law – a regime of government of the people, by the people, and for the people, under the rule of law. Or, in other words, a regime in which every citizen, social organization or company, and even government, can only do what is authorized by law. Now, the Executive branch cannot lift a finger without legal authorization, and it is the Legislative branch that grants this authorization through the laws it approves.

But can he thus completely paralyze the Executive branch, as he is attempting? Hasn't the system of checks and balances, proposed in 1748 by Montesquieu in France and developed by Madison in the United States in 1787, existed since the 18th century to balance the power of the three branches of government?

This system allows the Executive Branch to veto parts or all of a law approved by the Legislative Branch. However, the Legislative Branch can override these vetoes and enact the law itself. On the other hand, the Executive Branch has the power to issue decrees as if they were laws, with immediate validity, the so-called Provisional Measures. However, the Legislative Branch must approve them within the time frame set forth in the Constitution and they will fall to the ground if they are not approved.

Wasn't it like this that a few days ago the Chamber imposed a resounding defeat on the Executive, by rejecting one of its Provisional Measures precisely around the main difference that exists between the models of society that the Executive and the majority of the Legislative defend?

She gathered 293 votes out of the 513 deputies that the Chamber had (“had” because that number has just been increased by the Legislature itself) to say “no” to the Executive's proposal to “take” a small portion of the resources from the country's rich – the minority of society that this majority actually represents – to meet the needs of the majority of “poor” people, which the Lula government is trying to address precisely because it was elected to do exactly that. The detail is that negotiations to lessen the impact on the pockets of the rich were ignored…

For us, citizens who are laymen in the matter, there seems to be a missing link in these gears, because in practice the final word is with the Legislature, which does not fail to use it so that its choices prevail, unless the Judiciary can intervene in this power struggle.

Whatever the outcome of this clash, whether or not another branch of government intervenes within the logic of checks and balances, it provides us with an essential argument for presenting the objective of this text: a proposal to interfere in the composition of our Legislature, so that it represents our most needy majorities and not our privileged minorities. In other words, what can we, as citizens, our social organizations, and our political parties do so that we do not watch everything as passive spectators, solely for the enjoyment of well-paid journalists who turn everything into a spectacle?

How did this overwhelming majority come about? By relying on one of the largest thematic blocs in the opposition to the Lula government, the agribusiness bloc, with 306 members according to recent statistics. It should be noted that forming thematic blocs – such as those for cattle, guns, and evangelicals – is much more effective (because they can grow without limits) than the traditional "fronts" and party blocs, whose composition is controlled by the Chamber's Internal Regulations. But only now are Lula's supporters waking up to this strategy.

Even without that, the last elections resulted in a completely false representation – practically upside down – of the country's population: our representatives are 143 businesspeople, 103 farmers and large landowners, 54 military and police officers, 51 lawyers and legal professionals, 29 healthcare professionals, 25 religious leaders, 21 teachers, 19 non-military public employees, 9 journalists and artists, 2 from unions and social movements, and 50 whose affiliation is not specified. And the picture becomes even less representative if we consider that 422 are men and only 91 are women; by race, there are 345 white, 139 black, 28 Asian and other; and 5 indigenous.

But this situation is difficult to overcome – because its modification depends on electoral processes every four years. Therefore, it will not be easy to form a majority in Congress that truly represents our people. And we know that in the Legislative branch, decisions as a legislative body are not made by its Presidents or its Board of Directors, but by the vote of the majority of its members.

How do we get out of this impasse and dream of a different legislature? By starting now – in the 2026 elections – a process of democratic seizure of power, before our entire democracy is pushed into the mud, as is happening in many countries around the world, leading to barbaric wars that cause suffering to many people – and to ourselves, far from them, if we have any feeling of human solidarity.

I would venture to say that, based on the experience in which some parties and many social organizations – such as the CNBB – have already been involved, with great success, we must attack one of the fundamental distortions of our electoral process and our democracy: the possibility of a candidate being elected by buying votes from voters.

We must definitively eradicate from our electoral practices, in at least three consecutive campaigns (2026, 2028, and 2030), a crime first defined in 1932, almost a hundred years ago, in our first Electoral Code: “giving, offering, promising, or receiving, for oneself or another person, any advantage, such as money, goods, or favors, in exchange for votes.” This was a new way for the ruling elite to maintain power, a elite that previously relied on coerced voting and vote-buying based on official electoral records, which they themselves wrote. We cannot arrive in 2032 celebrating a hundred years of unpunished electoral crimes.

This practice has, over a long period, become an integral part of our political culture, as it is in all countries with significant social inequality. This is simply because the legislators of the time, and all those who followed until the end of the last century, made a small but significant mistake: they defined the crime – as something that could be committed by both those who buy and those who sell their vote – but they did not give the Electoral Court, which was also created at that time, the legal instruments and means to curb this crime. As a result, the number of people who have been punished for buying votes over the years can be counted on one's fingers.

This only really started to happen when civil society decided to use the power it was given in the 86 Constituent Assembly to present Popular Law Initiatives. And it tackled a topic that would never be addressed by the Legislature itself, whose members were the main beneficiaries of this crime (and that is why, when it was sent to Congress, it was said that it would never be approved...).

And led by the Brazilian Justice and Peace Commission, with the strong support of the CNBB, decided in the General Assembly, it collected the required million signatures, in a two-year effort, which resulted in law 9840/99, enacted in September in the last year of the last century.

The surprise of its approval led to the creation of the MCCE (Movement to Combat Electoral Corruption) associated with this proposal, which ten years later presented the popular initiative of the Clean Slate Law, also supported in a General Assembly by the CNBB (National Conference of Brazilian Bishops). It also led to the surprise of its results: in the following elections, 623 candidates failed to get elected because they were punished for the crime of vote buying, losing their candidate registrations and even mandates, and becoming ineligible for eight years (according to the Electoral Court).

In fact, anyone running for a legislative position has to obtain a large number of votes because the electoral quotients are quite high. And it is difficult to obtain this number only with beautiful speeches and proof of all one's qualities and that one will fulfill one's beautiful promises.

But the path of buying votes is much easier – you just need money to get many votes, and with a lot of money, you can collect thousands of them. Naturally, this was immediately perceived by the successors of the elite, whose only goal was to enter the political class to get rich.

Among these candidates, there are many whom we can classify as opportunists and exploiters, whether or not they are—being human beings as we all are—part of the ruling elite. They quickly realized that in Brazil—a country that boasts the highest rates of social inequality in the world—the market for potential vote buyers was enormous, even out of necessity for survival. The result is the low ethical and political quality of many of our parliamentarians, especially the most greedy ones who don't even need to join right-wing blocs to inflate their majorities and receive the rewards they seek.

Can't we create, over the next three years, in each of the Brazilian municipalities, small groups of voters willing to monitor elections for vote buying, to report them to the Public Prosecutor's Office, which will then forward them to the Judge who will punish them? For this, we will surely count on the support of the determined members of MCCE, an entity that brings together more than 70 national social organizations! Let's move forward in this revolution for democracy! At least our grandchildren will thank us.