Brazilian lawmakers dance around political reform

“Two steps here, two steps there”: When storied singer Elis Regina purrs the honeyed Brazilian bolero, lovers tingle. When deft politicians take up their familiar two-step, voters know that democracy is in for a hit. So it has been in recent weeks as national lawmakers have finally begun to overhaul Brazil’s discredited political system.
It’s about time. With 35 registered political parties—28 of them with seats in congress—Brazil is home to one of the most convoluted and politically fragmented governing establishments in the world, according to Getulio Vargas Foundation political scientist Octavio Amorim Neto. No other major democracy has so many legislative claim-stakers, or a national agenda ransomed to so many centrifugal interests.
All of that would seem to back the tired refrain that political reform—the “mother of all reforms,” as Brazilians sometimes put it—ought to top the congressional to-do list. After all, such a predatory ecosystem is what regularly sabotages policymaking and turned Brasilia into a tropical Gomorrah. Look no further than the Carwash case, Latin America’s biggest corruption scandal, in which government contractors made lawmakers and bureaucrats their men Friday.
The good news is that the political class, finally, is being forced to answer in court for their part in the scandal, and part of their response, sensibly, has been to back reforms—capping public spending, opening the oil sector, loosening labor laws—designed to revive the prostrate economy and reverse an unprecedented crisis of confidence. But don’t hold your breath. With general elections looming next year, Brazil’s quickstepping incumbents are now looking to tweak the rules just enough to pass as reformists but not so much that they’ll threaten their careers.
Consider the plan to create a publicly financed campaign fund of as much as 3.5 billion reais ($1.1 billion). Now, that may sound reasonable. Brazilian campaigns are pricey: The 2014 general elections officially cost around 5 billion reais ($1.8 billion). Throw in bribes and off-book donations, and total campaign spending might have been (no one knows for certain) four times that.
In 2015, with the corruption scandal in full swing, the Supreme Court banned corporate donations, a traditional sluiceway for bribes. Reformers hailed that landmark decision as a first move to scrub politics of freebooters and reset Brazilian democracy. And yet the political party fund seems more a distortion meant to fix another distortion. Not only would taxpayers have to pony up for candidates they may not even know, much less back, the funds will be distributed by political parties themselves—some of the least trusted institutions in Brazil. “Politicians want to replace an explosion of private donations with an explosion of public money,” said Fernando Schuler, a political analyst at the Sao Paulo management school Insper.
Fearing public backlash, poll-shy legislators curbed their lavish business plan this week, endorsing the fund but not the amount of money to be set aside. Brazilians will have to be doubly vigilant to avoid such apparent restraint from becoming a blank check.
Another promising idea is simplifying Brazil’s confusing electoral system, with its fractional parties and formfitting campaign coalitions. The problem dates back to 1988, when Brazil was emerging from a long dictatorship and lawmakers wanted to hardwire democracy into a new constitution by encouraging the creation of new political parties.

—Bloomberg